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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mutiny of the Elsinore, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Mutiny of the Elsinore
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: December, 2000 [eBook #2415]
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price and Rab Hughes
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE ***
+
+
+
+
+The Mutiny of the Elsinore
+
+by
+
+JACK LONDON
+
+MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
+49 RUPERT STREET
+LONDON, W.
+
+_Published 1915_
+
+_Copyright in the United States of America by_ Jack London
+
+
+Contents
+
+ CHAPTER I.
+ CHAPTER II.
+ CHAPTER III.
+ CHAPTER IV.
+ CHAPTER V.
+ CHAPTER VI.
+ CHAPTER VII.
+ CHAPTER VIII.
+ CHAPTER IX.
+ CHAPTER X.
+ CHAPTER XI.
+ CHAPTER XII.
+ CHAPTER XIII.
+ CHAPTER XIV.
+ CHAPTER XV.
+ CHAPTER XVI.
+ CHAPTER XVII.
+ CHAPTER XVIII.
+ CHAPTER XIX.
+ CHAPTER XX.
+ CHAPTER XXI.
+ CHAPTER XXII.
+ CHAPTER XXIII.
+ CHAPTER XXIV.
+ CHAPTER XXV.
+ CHAPTER XXVI.
+ CHAPTER XXVII.
+ CHAPTER XXVIII.
+ CHAPTER XXIX.
+ CHAPTER XXX.
+ CHAPTER XXXI.
+ CHAPTER XXXII.
+ CHAPTER XXXIII.
+ CHAPTER XXXIV.
+ CHAPTER XXXV.
+ CHAPTER XXXVI.
+ CHAPTER XXXVII.
+ CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+ CHAPTER XXXIX.
+ CHAPTER XL.
+ CHAPTER XLI.
+ CHAPTER XLII.
+ CHAPTER XLIII.
+ CHAPTER XLIV.
+ CHAPTER XLV.
+ CHAPTER XLVI.
+ CHAPTER XLVII.
+ CHAPTER XLVIII.
+ CHAPTER XLIX.
+ CHAPTER L.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a
+bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end
+precisely on time. At nine o’clock the tug was to have taken me down
+the bay and put me on board the _Elsinore_, and with growing irritation
+I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside, the
+driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree
+colder than mine. And there was no tug.
+
+Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted
+upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under
+the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered
+and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and bitten by the
+cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back.
+
+His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my
+jangled nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He
+meant nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily
+waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two
+little girls—evidently the wharfinger’s daughters—went by, my hand
+reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and
+present them with the puling little wretch.
+
+A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel
+the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith’s way. Yet
+he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit .
+. . or flowers, even. But no; his affectionate inspiration had to take
+the form of a yelping, yapping two months’ old puppy. And with the
+advent of the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me
+a criminal before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And then
+Wada, on his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had
+attempted to smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house
+detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into
+hysterical Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish;
+while the hotel clerk had given me to understand in no uncertain terms
+that it was only what he had expected of me.
+
+Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in the
+cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak
+that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
+
+By ten o’clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a
+suit-case, which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the
+wharfinger. It belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to
+the chauffeur how to find some other pier from which, at some
+indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the _Elsinore_ by some
+other tug. This served to increase my irritation. Why should I not have
+been informed as well as the pilot?
+
+An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the
+new pier, the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could not
+have imagined. Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the
+sea, but a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of
+successful business man one meets in all the clubs. He introduced
+himself immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with
+Possum and the baggage. That some change had been made in the
+arrangements by Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug
+would come along any time.
+
+And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait
+and freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made up my
+mind that I was not going to like this Captain West. Although I had
+never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the
+least, cavalier. When the _Elsinore_ lay in Erie Basin, just arrived
+from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over from New
+York to inspect what was to be my home for many months. I had been
+delighted with the ship and the cabin accommodation. Even the stateroom
+selected for me was satisfactory and far more spacious than I had
+expected. But when I peeped into the captain’s room I was amazed at its
+comfort. When I say that it opened directly into a bath-room, and that,
+among other things, it was furnished with a big brass bed such as one
+would never suspect to find at sea, I have said enough.
+
+Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed
+should be mine. When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain
+they seemed non-committal and uncomfortable. “I don’t know in the least
+what it is worth,” I said. “And I don’t care. Whether it costs one
+hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have those quarters.”
+
+Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and
+scarcely thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement.
+“Then he is the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn’t,” I
+asserted confidently. “Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners
+regularly sell their quarters.”
+
+“But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner,” Mr.
+Harrison observed gently.
+
+“Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month,” I retorted. “Why,
+heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary.”
+
+“We’ll try,” said Mr. Gray, “but we warn you not to place too much
+dependence on our efforts. Captain West is in Searsport at the present
+time, and we will write him to-day.”
+
+To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform
+me that Captain West had declined my offer. “Did you offer him up to a
+thousand?” I demanded. “What did he say?”
+
+“He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked,” Mr. Gray
+replied.
+
+A day later I received a letter from Captain West. The writing and the
+wording were old-fashioned and formal. He regretted not having yet met
+me, and assured me that he would see personally that my quarters were
+made comfortable. For that matter he had already dispatched orders to
+Mr. Pike, the first mate of the _Elsinore_, to knock out the partition
+between my state-room and the spare state-room adjoining. Further—and
+here is where my dislike for Captain West began—he informed me that if,
+when once well at sea, I should find myself dissatisfied, he would
+gladly, in that case, exchange quarters with me.
+
+Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could ever
+persuade me to occupy Captain West’s brass bed. And it was this Captain
+Nathaniel West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me freezing on
+pier-ends through four miserable hours. The less I saw of him on the
+voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a little tickle of
+pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I had dispatched on
+board from New York. Thank the Lord, I did not depend on sea captains
+for entertainment.
+
+I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and
+while the tug’s sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by
+the pilot to an introduction with Captain West. At the first glimpse I
+knew that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot. I
+had seen the best of the breed, the captains of the liners, and he no
+more resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced
+skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a woman, of whom
+little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of colour
+in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was well-nigh buried.
+
+“My God!—his wife!” I darted in a whisper at the pilot. “Going along
+with him? . . . ”
+
+I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage,
+that the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the
+_Elsinore_ taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had smiled
+and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.
+
+“It’s his daughter,” the pilot replied under his breath. “Come to see
+him off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say that is what
+sent him back to sea. He’d retired, you know.”
+
+Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
+touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips
+moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality.
+Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he
+was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as
+remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of
+Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of—oh—such distant
+and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner
+of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost
+colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin
+lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt’s
+when she moulds sound into speech.
+
+So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that
+I was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of
+untold beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most commonplace regrets
+at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me. It was low
+and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as a bell and touched with a
+faint reminiscent twang of old New England.
+
+“And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay,” he concluded
+my introduction to his daughter. “Margaret, this is Mr. Pathurst.”
+
+Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and I
+found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and gravely
+upon me. It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching gaze.
+It was not that it was challenging, but that it was so insolently
+business-like. It was much in the very way one would look at a new
+coachman he was about to engage. I did not know then that she was to go
+on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the man who was to be a
+fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only natural.
+Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes
+smiled as she spoke.
+
+As we moved on to enter the tug’s cabin I heard Possum’s shivering
+whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the
+creature in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my luggage,
+wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my little
+automatic rifle. I was startled by the mountain of luggage around which
+mine was no more than a fringe. Ship’s stores, was my first thought,
+until I noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and
+bundles of all sorts. The initials on what looked suspiciously like a
+woman’s hat trunk caught my eye—“M.W.” Yet Captain West’s first name
+was Nathaniel. On closer investigation I did find several “N.W’s.” but
+everywhere I could see “M.W’s.” Then I remembered that he had called
+her Margaret.
+
+I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold
+deck biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly stipulated with
+the agents that no captain’s wife was to come along. The last thing
+under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman. But
+I had never thought about a captain’s daughter. For two cents I was
+ready to throw the voyage over and return on the tug to Baltimore.
+
+By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I
+noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid
+being struck by the spring and vitality of her walk. Her face, despite
+its firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was belied by the
+robustness of her body. At least, one would argue that her body must be
+robust from her fashion of movement of it, though little could one
+divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of the furs.
+
+I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the mountain
+of luggage. A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and I was
+staring at it when she spoke at my shoulder.
+
+“That’s what really caused the delay,” she said.
+
+“What is it?” I asked incuriously.
+
+“Why, the _Elsinore’s_ piano, all renovated. When I made up my mind to
+come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike—he’s the mate, you know. He did his best.
+It was the fault of the piano house. And while we waited to-day I gave
+them a piece of my mind they’ll not forget in a hurry.”
+
+She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into
+the luggage as if in search of some particular piece. Having satisfied
+herself, she was starting back, when she paused and said:
+
+“Won’t you come into the cabin where it’s warm? We won’t be there for
+half an hour.”
+
+“When did you decide to make this voyage?” I demanded abruptly.
+
+So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment
+caught all my disgruntlement and disgust.
+
+“Two days ago,” she answered. “Why?”
+
+Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could speak
+she went on:
+
+“Now you’re not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst. I
+probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we’re all going
+to be comfortable and happy. You can’t bother me, and I promise you I
+won’t bother you. I’ve sailed with passengers before, and I’ve learned
+to put up with more than they ever proved they were able to put up
+with. So there. Let us start right, and it won’t be any trouble to keep
+on going right. I know what is the matter with you. You think you’ll be
+called upon to entertain me. Please know that I do not need
+entertainment. I never saw the longest voyage that was too long, and I
+always arrive at the end with too many things not done for the passage
+ever to have been tedious, and . . . I don’t play _Chopsticks_.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The _Elsinore_, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when
+we came alongside. I knew too little about ships to be capable of
+admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration. I
+was still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole thing
+and return on the tug. From all of which it must not be taken that I am
+a vacillating type of man. On the contrary.
+
+The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I
+been keen for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was
+because there was nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life
+had lost its savour. I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But the
+zest had gone out of things. I had lost taste for my fellow-men and all
+their foolish, little, serious endeavours. For a far longer period I
+had been dissatisfied with women. I had endured them, but I had been
+too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost
+ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them.
+And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of
+art—a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not
+only its devotees but its practitioners.
+
+In short, I was embarking on the _Elsinore_ because it was easier to
+than not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy. That
+was the curse of the condition into which I had fallen. That was why,
+as I stepped upon the deck of the _Elsinore_, I was half of a mind to
+tell them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain West and his
+daughter good-day.
+
+I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile Miss
+West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the cabin, and
+the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
+
+Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie
+Basin. He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be
+painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call
+orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled
+up from somewhere in the waist of the ship. Mr. Pike had been drinking.
+That was patent. His face was puffed and discoloured, and his large
+gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.
+
+I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and
+chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few
+words that would put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who were
+now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike any
+concept I had ever entertained of sailors. Certainly, on the liners, I
+had observed nothing that resembled them.
+
+One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of
+remarkable Italian eyes. But he was a dwarf. So short was he that he
+was all sea-boots and sou’wester. And yet he was not entirely Italian.
+So certain was I that I asked the mate, who answered morosely:
+
+“Him? Shorty? He’s a dago half-breed. The other half’s Jap or Malay.”
+
+One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought
+he had been recently injured. His face was stolid and ox-like, and as
+he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he paused every
+several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and execute a queer,
+pressing, lifting movement. Months were to pass, in which I saw him do
+this thousands of times, ere I learned that there was nothing the
+matter with him and that his action was purely a habit. His face
+reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it was unthinkably and
+abysmally stupider. And his name, as I was to learn, of all names was
+Sundry Buyers. And he was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship
+_Elsinore_—rated one of the finest sailing-ships afloat!
+
+Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw
+only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the
+slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like. He had come off
+a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage to
+sea. His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements, and he
+wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace. In fact, as I
+was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming creature fore and
+aft.
+
+The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any moment,
+the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy. Those already
+on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped themselves in New
+York without the mediation of boarding-house masters. And what the crew
+itself would be like God alone could tell—so said the mate. Shorty, the
+Japanese (or Malay) and Italian half-caste, the mate told me, was an
+able seaman, though he had come out of steam and this was his first
+sailing voyage.
+
+“Ordinary seamen!” Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question. “We don’t
+carry Landsmen!—forget it! Every clodhopper an’ cow-walloper these days
+is an able seaman. That’s the way they rank and are paid. The merchant
+service is all shot to hell. There ain’t no more sailors. They all died
+years ago, before you were born even.”
+
+I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate’s breath. Yet he did not
+stagger nor show any signs of intoxication. Not until afterward was I
+to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was where
+the liquor gave him away.
+
+“It’d a-ben a grace had I died years ago,” he said, “rather than to
+a-lived to see sailors an’ ships pass away from the sea.”
+
+“But I understand the _Elsinore_ is considered one of the finest,” I
+urged.
+
+“So she is . . . to-day. But what is she?—a damned cargo-carrier. She
+ain’t built for sailin’, an’ if she was there ain’t no sailors left to
+sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers! When I think of ’em!—_The
+Gamecock_, _Shootin’ Star_, _Flyin’ Fish_, _Witch o’ the Wave_,
+_Staghound_, _Harvey Birch_, _Canvas-back_, _Fleetwing_, _Sea Serpent_,
+_Northern Light_! An’ when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
+that used to load at Hong Kong an’ race the Eastern Passages. A fine
+sight! A fine sight!”
+
+I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to go
+into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I paced
+up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in all
+conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the profound
+stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.
+
+“You are a splendid figure of a man,” I complimented.
+
+“I was, I was,” he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey
+strong on the air.
+
+I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three
+of mine. His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
+
+“How much do you weigh?” I asked.
+
+“Two hundred an’ ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales
+close to two-forty.”
+
+“And the _Elsinore_ can’t sail,” I said, returning to the subject which
+had roused him.
+
+“I’ll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month’s
+wages, she won’t make it around in a hundred an’ fifty days,” he
+answered. “Yet I’ve come round in the old _Flyin’ Cloud_ in eighty-nine
+days—eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to ’Frisco. Sixty men
+for’ard that _was_ men, an’ eight boys, an’ drive! drive! drive! Three
+hundred an’ seventy-four miles for a day’s run under t’gallantsails,
+an’ in the squalls eighteen knots o’ line not enough to time her.
+Eighty-nine days—never beat, an’ tied once by the old _Andrew Jackson_
+nine years afterwards. Them was the days!”
+
+“When did the _Andrew Jackson_ tie her?” I asked, because of the
+growing suspicion that he was “having” me.
+
+“In 1860,” was his prompt reply.
+
+“And you sailed in the _Flying Cloud_ nine years before that, and this
+is 1913—why, that was sixty-two years ago,” I charged.
+
+“And I was seven years old,” he chuckled. “My mother was stewardess on
+the _Flyin’ Cloud_. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was twelve, on
+the _Herald o’ the Morn_, when she made around in ninety-nine days—half
+the crew in irons most o’ the time, five men lost from aloft off the
+Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square off,
+knuckle-dusters an’ belayin’-pins flyin’, three men shot by the
+officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an’ no one to know who
+done it, an’ drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land to land, a
+run of seventeen thousand miles, an’ east to west around Cape Stiff!”
+
+“But that would make you sixty-nine years old,” I insisted.
+
+“Which I am,” he retorted proudly, “an’ a better man at that than the
+scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of ’em would die under
+the things I’ve been through. Did you ever hear of the _Sunny
+South_?—she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an’ changed her name
+to _Emanuela_?”
+
+“And you’ve sailed the Middle Passage!” I cried, recollecting the old
+phrase.
+
+“I was on the _Emanuela_ that day in Mozambique Channel when the
+_Brisk_ caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she
+wouldn’t a-caught us except for her having steam.”
+
+I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the
+past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old
+man-killing and man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and yet,
+as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge feet, I
+was convinced that his years were as he asserted. He spoke of a Captain
+Sonurs.
+
+“He was a great captain,” he was saying. “An’ in the two years I sailed
+mate with him there was never a port I didn’t jump the ship goin’ in
+an’ stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed again.”
+
+“But why?”
+
+“The men, on account of the men swearin’ blood an’ vengeance and
+warrants against me because of my ways of teachin’ them to be sailors.
+Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid for me—and
+yet it was my work that made the ship make money.”
+
+He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed
+knuckles I understood the nature of his work.
+
+“But all that’s stopped now,” he lamented. “A sailor’s a gentleman
+these days. You can’t raise your voice or your hand to them.”
+
+At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the second
+mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
+
+“The tug’s in sight with the crew, sir,” he announced.
+
+The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, “Come on down, Mr.
+Mellaire, and meet our passenger.”
+
+I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire
+came down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction. He was
+courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and unmistakably
+from south of Mason and Dixon.
+
+“A Southerner,” I said.
+
+“Georgia, sir.” He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow and
+smile.
+
+His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth
+was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man’s face. It was a gash.
+There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless
+mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I
+glanced at his hands. Like the mate’s, they were thick-boned,
+broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes I looked. On
+the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of gentle kindness and
+cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided neither sincerity nor
+mercy. Behind that gloss was something cold and terrible, that lurked
+and waited and watched—something catlike, something inimical and
+deadly. Behind that gloss of soft light and of social sparkle was the
+live, fearful thing that had shaped that mouth into the gash it was.
+What I sensed behind in those eyes chilled me with its repulsiveness
+and strangeness.
+
+As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and exchanged
+amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest
+or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying
+upon him. Frankly I was afraid of the thing ambushed behind there in
+the skull of Mr. Mellaire. One so as a matter of course identifies form
+and feature with the spirit within. But I could not do this with the
+second mate. His face and form and manner and suave ease were one
+thing, inside which he, an entirely different thing, lay hid.
+
+I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask for
+instructions. I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside. Mr. Pike
+looked at me quickly and said:
+
+“Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst.”
+
+He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and
+started for’ard. I stood and waited for Mr. Pike’s communication, which
+he did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out of
+ear-shot. Then he leaned closely to me and said:
+
+“Don’t mention that little matter of my age to anybody. Each year I
+sign on I sign my age one year younger. I am fifty-four, now, on the
+articles.”
+
+“And you don’t look a day older,” I answered lightly, though I meant it
+in all sincerity.
+
+“And I don’t feel it. I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the
+younglings. And don’t let my age get to anybody’s ears, Mr. Pathurst.
+Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the seventy mark.
+And owners neither. I’ve had my hopes for this ship, and I’d a-got her,
+I think, except for the old man decidin’ to go to sea again. As if he
+needed the money! The old skinflint!”
+
+“Is he well off?” I inquired.
+
+“Well off! If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken
+ranch in California and live like a fighting cock—yes, if I had a
+fiftieth of what he’s got salted away. Why, he owns more stock in all
+the Blackwood ships . . . and they’ve always been lucky and always
+earned money. I’m getting old, and it’s about time I got a command. But
+no; the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to sea again just
+as the berth’s ripe for me to fall into.”
+
+Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
+
+“Mr. Pathurst? You won’t mention about my age?”
+
+“No, certainly not, Mr. Pike,” I said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Quite chilled through, I was immediately struck by the warm comfort of
+the cabin. All the connecting doors were open, making what I might call
+a large suite of rooms or a whale house. The main-deck entrance, on the
+port side, was into a wide, well-carpeted hallway. Into this hallway,
+from the port side, opened five rooms: first, on entering, the mate’s;
+next, the two state-rooms which had been knocked into one for me; then
+the steward’s room; and, adjoining his, completing the row, a
+state-room which was used for the slop-chest.
+
+Across the hall was a region with which I was not yet acquainted,
+though I knew it contained the dining-room, the bath-rooms, the cabin
+proper, which was in truth a spacious living-room, the captain’s
+quarters, and, undoubtedly, Miss West’s quarters. I could hear her
+humming some air as she bustled about with her unpacking. The steward’s
+pantry, separated by crosshalls and by the stairway leading into the
+chart-room above on the poop, was placed strategically in the centre of
+all its operations. Thus, on the starboard side of it were the
+state-rooms of the captain and Miss West, for’ard of it were the
+dining-room and main cabin; while on the port side of it was the row of
+rooms I have described, two of which were mine.
+
+I ventured down the hall toward the stern, and found it opened into the
+stern of the _Elsinore_, forming a single large apartment at least
+thirty-five feet from side to side and fifteen to eighteen feet in
+depth, curved, of course, to the lines of the ship’s stern. This seemed
+a store-room. I noted wash-tubs, bolts of canvas, many lockers, hams
+and bacon hanging, a step-ladder that led up through a small hatch to
+the poop, and, in the floor, another hatch.
+
+I spoke to the steward, an old Chinese, smooth-faced and brisk of
+movement, whose name I never learned, but whose age on the articles was
+fifty-six.
+
+“What is down there?” I asked, pointing to the hatch in the floor.
+
+“Him lazarette,” he answered.
+
+“And who eats there?” I indicated a table with two stationary
+sea-chairs.
+
+“Him second table. Second mate and carpenter him eat that table.”
+
+When I had finished giving instructions to Wada for the arranging of my
+things I looked at my watch. It was early yet, only several minutes
+after three so I went on deck again to witness the arrival of the crew.
+
+The actual coming on board from the tug I had missed, but for’ard of
+the amidship house I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone
+into the forecastle. These were the worse for liquor, and a more
+wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any
+slum. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and
+dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and
+vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.
+
+“Come! Come! Get your dunnage into the fo’c’s’le!”
+
+Mr. Pike uttered these words sharply from the bridge above. A light and
+graceful bridge of steel rods and planking ran the full length of the
+_Elsinore_, starting from the poop, crossing the amidship house and the
+forecastle, and connecting with the forecastle-head at the very bow of
+the ship.
+
+At the mate’s command the men reeled about and glowered up at him, one
+or two starting clumsily to obey. The others ceased their drunken
+yammerings and regarded the mate sullenly. One of them, with a face
+mashed by some mad god in the making, and who was afterwards to be
+known by me as Larry, burst into a guffaw, and spat insolently on the
+deck. Then, with utmost deliberation, he turned to his fellows and
+demanded loudly and huskily:
+
+“Who in hell’s the old stiff, anyways?”
+
+I saw Mr. Pike’s huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and I
+noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the
+bridge-railing. Beyond that he controlled himself.
+
+“Go on, you,” he said. “I’ll have nothing out of you. Get into the
+fo’c’s’le.”
+
+And then, to my surprise, he turned and walked aft along the bridge to
+where the tug was casting off its lines. So this was all his high and
+mighty talk of kill and drive, I thought. Not until afterwards did I
+recollect, as I turned aft down the deck, that I saw Captain West
+leaning on the rail at the break of the poop and gazing for’ard.
+
+The tug’s lines were being cast off, and I was interested in watching
+the manoeuvre until she had backed clear of the ship, at which moment,
+from for’ard, arose a queer babel of howling and yelping, as numbers of
+drunken voices cried out that a man was overboard. The second mate
+sprang down the poop-ladder and darted past me along the deck. The
+mate, still on the slender, white-painted bridge, that seemed no more
+than a spider thread, surprised me by the activity with which he dashed
+along the bridge to the ’midship house, leaped upon the canvas-covered
+long-boat, and swung outboard where he might see. Before the men could
+clamber upon the rail the second mate was among them, and it was he who
+flung a coil of line overboard.
+
+What impressed me particularly was the mental and muscular superiority
+of these two officers. Despite their age—the mate sixty-nine and the
+second mate at least fifty—their minds and their bodies had acted with
+the swiftness and accuracy of steel springs. They were potent. They
+were iron. They were perceivers, willers, and doers. They were as of
+another species compared with the sailors under them. While the latter,
+witnesses of the happening and directly on the spot, had been crying
+out in befuddled helplessness, and with slow wits and slower bodies
+been climbing upon the rail, the second mate had descended the steep
+ladder from the poop, covered two hundred feet of deck, sprung upon the
+rail, grasped the instant need of the situation, and cast the coil of
+line into the water.
+
+And of the same nature and quality had been the actions of Mr. Pike. He
+and Mr. Mellaire were masters over the wretched creatures of sailors by
+virtue of this remarkable difference of efficiency and will. Truly,
+they were more widely differentiated from the men under them than were
+the men under them differentiated from Hottentots—ay, and from monkeys.
+
+I, too, by this time, was standing on the big hawser-bitts in a
+position to see a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming
+away from the ship. He was a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some sort,
+and his face, in a clear glimpse I caught of it, was distorted by
+frenzy. His black eyes were maniacal. The line was so accurately flung
+by the second mate that it fell across the man’s shoulders, and for
+several strokes his arms tangled in it ere he could swim clear. This
+accomplished, he proceeded to scream some wild harangue and once, as he
+uptossed his arms for emphasis, I saw in his hand the blade of a long
+knife.
+
+Bells were jangling on the tug as it started to the rescue. I stole a
+look up at Captain West. He had walked to the port side of the poop,
+where, hands in pockets, he was glancing, now for’ard at the struggling
+man, now aft at the tug. He gave no orders, betrayed no excitement, and
+appeared, I may well say, the most casual of spectators.
+
+The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his clothes.
+I saw one bare arm, and then the other, appear. In his struggles he
+sometimes sank beneath the surface, but always he emerged, flourishing
+the knife and screaming his addled harangue. He even tried to escape
+the tug by diving and swimming underneath.
+
+I strolled for’ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over the
+rail of the _Elsinore_. He was stark naked, covered with blood, and
+raving. He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places. From one
+wound in the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the pulse. He
+was a loathsome, non-human thing. I have seen a scared orang in a zoo,
+and for all the world this bestial-faced, mowing, gibbering thing
+reminded me of the orang. The sailors surrounded him, laying hands on
+him, withstraining him, the while they guffawed and cheered. Right and
+left the two mates shoved them away, and dragged the lunatic down the
+deck and into a room in the ’midship house. I could not help marking
+the strength of Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire. I had heard of the
+superhuman strength of madmen, but this particular madman was as a wisp
+of straw in their hands. Once into the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the
+struggling fool easily with one hand while he dispatched the second
+mate for marlin with which to tie the fellow’s arms.
+
+“Bughouse,” Mr. Pike grinned at me. “I’ve seen some bughouse crews in
+my time, but this one’s the limit.”
+
+“What are you going to do?” I asked. “The man will bleed to death.”
+
+“And good riddance,” he answered promptly. “We’ll have our hands full
+of him until we can lose him somehow. When he gets easy I’ll sew him
+up, that’s all, if I have to ease him with a clout of the jaw.”
+
+I glanced at the mate’s huge paw and appreciated its anæsthetic
+qualities. Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands
+still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky
+to the north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the
+drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in
+pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world from any I had
+known.
+
+Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say
+that Miss West was serving tea in the cabin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The contrast, as I entered the cabin, was startling. All contrasts
+aboard the _Elsinore_ promised to be startling. Instead of the cold,
+hard deck my feet sank into soft carpet. In place of the mean and
+narrow room, built of naked iron, where I had left the lunatic, I was
+in a spacious and beautiful apartment. With the bawling of the men’s
+voices still in my ears, and with the pictures of their drink-puffed
+and filthy faces still vivid under my eyelids, I found myself greeted
+by a delicate-faced, prettily-gowned woman who sat beside a lacquered
+oriental table on which rested an exquisite tea-service of Canton
+china. All was repose and calm. The steward, noiseless-footed,
+expressionless, was a shadow, scarcely noticed, that drifted into the
+room on some service and drifted out again.
+
+Not at once could I relax, and Miss West, serving my tea, laughed and
+said:
+
+“You look as if you had been seeing things. The steward tells me a man
+has been overboard. I fancy the cold water must have sobered him.”
+
+I resented her unconcern.
+
+“The man is a lunatic,” I said. “This ship is no place for him. He
+should be sent ashore to some hospital.”
+
+“I am afraid, if we begin that, we’d have to send two-thirds of our
+complement ashore—one lump?
+
+“Yes, please,” I answered. “But the man has terribly wounded himself.
+He is liable to bleed to death.”
+
+She looked at me for a moment, her gray eyes serious and scrutinizing,
+as she passed me my cup; then laughter welled up in her eyes, and she
+shook her head reprovingly.
+
+“Now please don’t begin the voyage by being shocked, Mr. Pathurst. Such
+things are very ordinary occurrences. You’ll get used to them. You must
+remember some queer creatures go down to the sea in ships. The man is
+safe. Trust Mr. Pike to attend to his wounds. I’ve never sailed with
+Mr. Pike, but I’ve heard enough about him. Mr. Pike is quite a surgeon.
+Last voyage, they say, he performed a successful amputation, and so
+elated was he that he turned his attention on the carpenter, who
+happened to be suffering from some sort of indigestion. Mr. Pike was so
+convinced of the correctness of his diagnosis that he tried to bribe
+the carpenter into having his appendix removed.” She broke off to laugh
+heartily, then added: “They say he offered the poor man just pounds and
+pounds of tobacco to consent to the operation.”
+
+“But is it safe . . . for the . . . the working of the ship,” I urged,
+“to take such a lunatic along?”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, as if not intending to reply, then said:
+
+“This incident is nothing. There are always several lunatics or idiots
+in every ship’s company. And they always come aboard filled with
+whiskey and raving. I remember, once, when we sailed from Seattle, a
+long time ago, one such madman. He showed no signs of madness at all;
+just calmly seized two boarding-house runners and sprang overboard with
+them. We sailed the same day, before the bodies were recovered.”
+
+Again she shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“What would you? The sea is hard, Mr. Pathurst. And for our sailors we
+get the worst type of men. I sometimes wonder where they find them. And
+we do our best with them, and somehow manage to make them help us carry
+on our work in the world. But they are low . . . low.”
+
+As I listened, and studied her face, contrasting her woman’s
+sensitivity and her soft pretty dress with the brute faces and rags of
+the men I had noticed, I could not help being convinced intellectually
+of the rightness of her position. Nevertheless, I was hurt
+sentimentally,—chiefly, I do believe, because of the very hardness and
+unconcern with which she enunciated her view. It was because she was a
+woman, and so different from the sea-creatures, that I resented her
+having received such harsh education in the school of the sea.
+
+“I could not help remarking your father’s—er, er _sang froid_ during
+the occurrence.” I ventured.
+
+“He never took his hands from his pockets!” she cried.
+
+Her eyes sparkled as I nodded confirmation.
+
+“I knew it! It’s his way. I’ve seen it so often. I remember when I was
+twelve years old—mother was alone—we were running into San Francisco.
+It was in the _Dixie_, a ship almost as big as this. There was a strong
+fair wind blowing, and father did not take a tug. We sailed right
+through the Golden Gate and up the San Francisco water-front. There was
+a swift flood tide, too; and the men, both watches, were taking in sail
+as fast as they could.
+
+“Now the fault was the steamboat captain’s. He miscalculated our speed
+and tried to cross our bow. Then came the collision, and the _Dixie’s_
+bow cut through that steamboat, cabin and hull. There were hundreds of
+passengers, men, women, and children. Father never took his hands from
+his pockets. He sent the mate for’ard to superintend rescuing the
+passengers, who were already climbing on to our bowsprit and
+forecastle-head, and in a voice no different from what he’d use to ask
+some one to pass the butter he told the second mate to set all sail.
+And he told him which sails to begin with.”
+
+“But why set more sails?” I interrupted.
+
+“Because he could see the situation. Don’t you see, the steamboat was
+cut wide open. All that kept her from sinking instantly was the bow of
+the _Dixie_ jammed into her side. By setting more sail and keeping
+before the wind, he continued to keep the bow of the _Dixie_ jammed.
+
+“I was terribly frightened. People who had sprung or fallen overboard
+were drowning on each side of us, right in my sight, as we sailed along
+up the water-front. But when I looked at father, there he was, just as
+I had always known him, hands in pockets, walking slowly up and down,
+now giving an order to the wheel—you see, he had to direct the
+_Dixie’s_ course through all the shipping—now watching the passengers
+swarming over our bow and along our deck, now looking ahead to see his
+way through the ships at anchor. Sometimes he did glance at the poor,
+drowning ones, but he was not concerned with them.
+
+“Of course, there were numbers drowned, but by keeping his hands in his
+pockets and his head cool he saved hundreds of lives. Not until the
+last person was off the steamboat—he sent men aboard to make sure—did
+he take off the press of sail. And the steamboat sank at once.”
+
+She ceased, and looked at me with shining eyes for approbation.
+
+“It was splendid,” I acknowledged. “I admire the quiet man of power,
+though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
+unearthly and beyond human. I can’t conceive of myself acting that way,
+and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor devil was
+in the water than all the rest of the onlookers put together.”
+
+“Father suffers!” she defended loyally. “Only he does not show it.”
+
+I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug _Britannia_ in sight.
+She was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea.
+Strolling for’ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the
+forecastle by Sundry Buyers, forever tenderly pressing his abdomen with
+his hands. Another man was helping Sundry Buyers at routing out the
+sailors. I asked Mr. Pike who the man was.
+
+“Nancy—my bosun; ain’t he a peach?” was the answer I got, and from the
+mate’s manner of enunciation I was quite aware that “Nancy” had been
+used derisively.
+
+Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he
+had lived a very long time. He was toothless and sad and weary of
+movement. His eyes were slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face was
+sickly yellow. Narrow-shouldered, sunken-chested, with cheeks
+cavernously hollow, he looked like a man in the last stages of
+consumption. Little life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even
+less life. And these were bosuns!—bosuns of the fine American
+sailing-ship _Elsinore_! Never had any illusion of mine taken a more
+distressing cropper.
+
+It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless, were
+afraid of the men they were supposed to boss. And the men! Doré could
+never have conjured a more delectable hell’s broth. For the first time
+I saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns for being afraid
+of them. They did not walk. They slouched and shambled, some even
+tottered, as from weakness or drink.
+
+But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West had
+just told me—that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots
+in their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic or
+feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage
+could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them.
+Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without
+exception they were under-sized. The several quite fairly large men I
+marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large and unmistakably
+Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking and muttering to
+himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his head
+on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue
+eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him
+O’Sullivan. But O’Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the heels
+of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth,
+followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed
+a marvel his flesh could hold his frame together.
+
+Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
+have ever beheld. He was a twisted oaf of a man. Face and body were
+twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture. His was the
+face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His large black eyes
+were bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed
+questioningly from face to face and to everything about. They were so
+pitifully alert, those eyes, as if forever astrain to catch the clue to
+some perplexing and threatening enigma. Not until afterwards did I
+learn the cause of this. He was stone deaf, having had his ear-drums
+destroyed in the boiler explosion which had wrecked the rest of him.
+
+I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the men
+from a distance. His keen, Asiatic face, quick with intelligence, was a
+relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the
+forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was
+something wrong with him, too. He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to
+know, his high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown.
+
+Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I
+watched him. The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer, and
+it was plain that he was disgusted with the quality of cattle
+delivered.
+
+“Something the matter with the last mother’s son of them,” he growled.
+
+And still they came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly
+adjudged a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced
+and wrinkled, with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small,
+well-fleshed man, who seemed to my eye the most normal and least
+unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared. But Mr. Pike’s eye was
+better trained than mine.
+
+“What’s the matter with _you_?” he snarled at the man.
+
+“Nothing, sir,” the fellow answered, stopping immediately.
+
+“What’s your name?”
+
+Mr. Pike never spoke to a sailor save with a snarl.
+
+“Charles Davis, sir.”
+
+“What are you limping about?”
+
+“I ain’t limpin’, sir,” the man answered respectfully, and, at a nod of
+dismissal from the mate, marched off jauntily along the deck with a
+hoodlum swing to the shoulders.
+
+“He’s a sailor all right,” the mate grumbled; “but I’ll bet you a pound
+of tobacco or a month’s wages there’s something wrong with him.”
+
+The forecastle now seemed empty, but the mate turned on the bosuns with
+his customary snarl.
+
+“What in hell are you doing? Sleeping? Think this is a rest cure? Get
+in there an’ rustle ’em out!”
+
+Sundry Buyers pressed his abdomen gingerly and hesitated, while Nancy,
+his face one dogged, long-suffering bleakness, reluctantly entered the
+forecastle. Then, from inside, we heard oaths, vile and filthy, urgings
+and expostulations on the part of Nancy, meekly and pleadingly uttered.
+
+I noted the grim and savage look that came on Mr. Pike’s face, and was
+prepared for I knew not what awful monstrosities to emerge from the
+forecastle. Instead, to my surprise, came three fellows who were
+strikingly superior to the ruck that had preceded them. I looked to see
+the mate’s face soften to some sort of approval. On the contrary, his
+blue eyes contracted to narrow slits, the snarl of his voice was
+communicated to his lips, so that he seemed like a dog about to bite.
+
+But the three fellows. They were small men, all; and young men,
+anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. Though roughly dressed, they
+were well dressed, and under their clothes their bodily movements
+showed physical well-being. Their faces were keen cut, intelligent. And
+though I felt there was something queer about them, I could not divine
+what it was.
+
+Here were no ill-fed, whiskey-poisoned men, such as the rest of the
+sailors, who, having drunk up their last pay-days, had starved ashore
+until they had received and drunk up their advance money for the
+present voyage. These three, on the other hand were supple and
+vigorous. Their movements were spontaneously quick and accurate.
+Perhaps it was the way they looked at me, with incurious yet
+calculating eyes that nothing escaped. They seemed so worldly wise, so
+indifferent, so sure of themselves. I was confident they were not
+sailors. Yet, as shore-dwellers, I could not place them. They were a
+type I had never encountered. Possibly I can give a better idea of them
+by describing what occurred.
+
+As they passed before us they favoured Mr. Pike with the same
+indifferent, keen glances they gave me.
+
+“What’s your name—you?” Mr. Pike barked at the first of the trio,
+evidently a hybrid Irish-Jew. Jewish his nose unmistakably was. Equally
+unmistakable was the Irish of his eyes, and jaw, and upper lip.
+
+The three had immediately stopped, and, though they did not look
+directly at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference.
+Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic,
+Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so
+crass as a wink or a nod. I almost doubted that I had intercepted it,
+and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his fellows. More a
+shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of
+sudden light—or whatever it was, it carried the message.
+
+“Murphy,” the other answered the mate.
+
+“Sir!” Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Murphy shrugged his shoulders in token that he did not understand. It
+was the poise of the man, of the three of them, the cool poise that
+impressed me.
+
+“When you address any officer on this ship you’ll say ‘sir,’” Mr. Pike
+explained, his voice as harsh as his face was forbidding. “Did you get
+_that_?”
+
+“Yes . . . sir,” Murphy drawled with deliberate slowness. “I gotcha.”
+
+“Sir!” Mr. Pike roared.
+
+“Sir,” Murphy answered, so softly and carelessly that it irritated the
+mate to further bullyragging.
+
+“Well, Murphy’s too long,” he announced. “Nosey’ll do you aboard this
+craft. Got _that_?”
+
+“I gotcha . . . sir,” came the reply, insolent in its very softness and
+unconcern. “Nosey Murphy goes . . . sir.”
+
+And then he laughed—the three of them laughed, if laughter it might be
+called that was laughter without sound or facial movement. The eyes
+alone laughed, mirthlessly and cold-bloodedly.
+
+Certainly Mr. Pike was not enjoying himself with these baffling
+personalities. He turned upon the leader, the one who had given the
+warning and who looked the admixture of all that was Mediterranean and
+Semitic.
+
+“What’s _your_ name?”
+
+“Bert Rhine . . . sir,” was the reply, in tones as soft and careless
+and silkily irritating as the other’s.
+
+“And _you_?”—this to the remaining one, the youngest of the trio, a
+dark-eyed, olive-skinned fellow with a face most striking in its
+cameo-like beauty. American-born, I placed him, of immigrants from
+Southern Italy—from Naples, or even Sicily.
+
+“Twist . . . sir,” he answered, precisely in the same manner as the
+others.
+
+“Too long,” the mate sneered. “The Kid’ll do you. Got _that_?”
+
+“I gotcha . . . sir. Kid Twist’ll do me . . . sir.”
+
+“Kid’ll do!”
+
+“Kid . . . sir.”
+
+And the three laughed their silent, mirthless laugh. By this time Mr.
+Pike was beside himself with a rage that could find no excuse for
+action.
+
+“Now I’m going to tell you something, the bunch of you, for the good of
+your health.” The mate’s voice grated with the rage he was suppressing.
+“I know your kind. You’re dirt. D’ye get _that_? You’re dirt. And on
+this ship you’ll be treated as dirt. You’ll do your work like men, or
+I’ll know the reason why. The first time one of you bats an eye, or
+even looks like batting an eye, he gets his. D’ye get that? Now get
+out. Get along for’ard to the windlass.”
+
+Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved
+aft.
+
+“What do you make of them?” I queried.
+
+“The limit,” he grunted. “I know their kidney. They’ve done time, the
+three of them. They’re just plain sweepings of hell—”
+
+Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on
+Number Two hatch. Sprawled out on the hatch were five or six men, among
+them Larry, the tatterdemalion who had called him “old stiff” earlier
+in the afternoon. That Larry had not obeyed orders was patent, for he
+was sitting with his back propped against his sea-bag, which ought to
+have been in the forecastle. Also, he and the group with him ought to
+have been for’ard manning the windlass.
+
+The mate stepped upon the hatch and towered over the man.
+
+“Get up,” he ordered.
+
+Larry made an effort, groaned, and failed to get up.
+
+“I can’t,” he said.
+
+“Sir!”
+
+“I can’t, sir. I was drunk last night an’ slept in Jefferson Market.
+An’ this mornin’ I was froze tight, sir. They had to pry me loose.”
+
+“Stiff with the cold you were, eh?” the mate grinned.
+
+“It’s well ye might say it, sir,” Larry answered.
+
+“And you feel like an old stiff, eh?”
+
+Larry blinked with the troubled, querulous eyes of a monkey. He was
+beginning to apprehend he knew not what, and he knew that bending over
+him was a man-master.
+
+“Well, I’ll just be showin’ you what an old stiff feels like, anyways.”
+Mr. Pike mimicked the other’s brogue.
+
+And now I shall tell what I saw happen. Please remember what I have
+said of the huge paws of Mr. Pike, the fingers much longer than mine
+and twice as thick, the wrists massive-boned, the arm-bones and the
+shoulder-bones of the same massive order. With one flip of his right
+hand, with what I might call an open-handed, lifting, upward slap, save
+that it was the ends of the fingers only that touched Larry’s face, he
+lifted Larry into the air, sprawling him backward on his back across
+his sea-bag.
+
+The man alongside of Larry emitted a menacing growl and started to
+spring belligerently to his feet. But he never reached his feet. Mr.
+Pike, with the back of same right hand, open, smote the man on the side
+of the face. The loud smack of the impact was startling. The mate’s
+strength was amazing. The blow looked so easy, so effortless; it had
+seemed like the lazy stroke of a good-natured bear, but in it was such
+a weight of bone and muscle that the man went down sidewise and rolled
+off the hatch on to the deck.
+
+At this moment, lurching aimlessly along, appeared O’Sullivan. A sudden
+access of muttering, on his part, reached Mr. Pike’s ear, and Mr. Pike,
+instantly keen as a wild animal, his paw in the act of striking
+O’Sullivan, whipped out like a revolver shot, “What’s that?” Then he
+noted the sense-struck face of O’Sullivan and withheld the blow.
+“Bug-house,” Mr. Pike commented.
+
+Involuntarily I had glanced to see if Captain West was on the poop, and
+found that we were hidden from the poop by the ’midship house.
+
+Mr. Pike, taking no notice of the man who lay groaning on the deck,
+stood over Larry, who was likewise groaning. The rest of the sprawling
+men were on their feet, subdued and respectful. I, too, was respectful
+of this terrific, aged figure of a man. The exhibition had quite
+convinced me of the verity of his earlier driving and killing days.
+
+“Who’s the old stiff now?” he demanded.
+
+“’Tis me, sir,” Larry moaned contritely.
+
+“Get up!”
+
+Larry got up without any difficulty at all.
+
+“Now get for’ard to the windlass! The rest of you!”
+
+And they went, sullenly, shamblingly, like the cowed brutes they were.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+I climbed the ladder on the side of the for’ard house (which house
+contained, as I discovered, the forecastle, the galley, and the
+donkey-engine room), and went part way along the bridge to a position
+by the foremast, where I could observe the crew heaving up anchor. The
+_Britannia_ was alongside, and we were getting under way.
+
+A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or
+variously engaged on the forecastle-head. Of the crew proper were two
+watches of fifteen men each. In addition were sailmakers, boys, bosuns,
+and the carpenter. Nearly forty men were they, but such men! They were
+sad and lifeless. There was no vim, no go, no activity. Every step and
+movement was an effort, as if they were dead men raised out of coffins
+or sick men dragged from hospital beds. Sick they
+were—whiskey-poisoned. Starved they were, and weak from poor nutrition.
+And worst of all, they were imbecile and lunatic.
+
+I looked aloft at the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and
+carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel
+masts and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and
+stays turned into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the sky.
+That such a wretched muck of men should be able to work this
+magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and peril of the sea
+was beyond all seeming. I remembered the two mates, the
+super-efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr.
+Pike—could they make this human wreckage do it? They, at least, evinced
+no doubts of their ability. The sea? If this feat of mastery were
+possible, then clear it was that I knew nothing of the sea.
+
+I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men
+who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These
+were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of
+the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the
+points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were killed,
+but who did their work as men. These men, these shambling carcasses at
+the windlass—I looked, and looked, and vainly I strove to conjure the
+vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm, “clearing the raffle,”
+as Kipling puts it, “with their clasp knives in their teeth.” Why
+didn’t they sing a chanty as they hove the anchor up? In the old days,
+as I had read, the anchor always came up to the rollicking sailor songs
+of sea-chested men.
+
+I tired of watching the spiritless performance, and went aft on an
+exploring trip along the slender bridge. It was a beautiful structure,
+strong yet light, traversing the length of the ship in three aerial
+leaps. It spanned from the forecastle-head to the forecastle-house,
+next to the ’midship house, and then to the poop. The poop, which was
+really the roof or deck over all the cabin space below, and which
+occupied the whole after-part of the ship, was very large. It was
+broken only by the half-round and half-covered wheel-house at the very
+stern and by the chart-house. On either side of the latter two doors
+opened into a tiny hallway. This, in turn, gave access to the
+chart-room and to a stairway that led down into the cabin quarters
+beneath.
+
+I peeped into the chart-room and was greeted with a smile by Captain
+West. He was lolling back comfortably in a swing chair, his feet cocked
+on the desk opposite. On a broad, upholstered couch sat the pilot. Both
+were smoking cigars; and, lingering for a moment to listen to the
+conversation, I grasped that the pilot was an ex-sea-captain.
+
+As I descended the stairs, from Miss West’s room came a sound of
+humming and bustling, as she settled her belongings. The energy she
+displayed, to judge by the cheerful noises of it, was almost
+perturbing.
+
+Passing by the pantry, I put my head inside the door to greet the
+steward and courteously let him know that I was aware of his existence.
+Here, in his little realm, it was plain that efficiency reigned.
+Everything was spotless and in order, and I could have wished and
+wished vainly for a more noiseless servant than he ashore. His face, as
+he regarded me, had as little or as much expression as the Sphinx. But
+his slant, black eyes were bright, with intelligence.
+
+“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, in order to put words to my
+invasion of his castle.
+
+“Buggy-house,” he answered promptly, with a disgusted shake of the
+head. “Too much buggy-house. All crazy. You see. No good. Rotten. Down
+to hell.”
+
+That was all, but it verified my own judgment. While it might be true,
+as Miss West had said, that every ship’s crew contained several
+lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew
+contained far more than several. In fact, and as it was to turn out,
+our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in
+so far as its helplessness and worthlessness were beyond the average.
+
+I found my own room (in reality it was two rooms) delightful. Wada had
+unpacked and stored away my entire outfit of clothing, and had filled
+numerous shelves with the library I had brought along. Everything was
+in order and place, from my shaving outfit in the drawer beside the
+wash-basin, and my sea-boots and oilskins hung ready to hand, to my
+writing materials on the desk, before which a swing arm-chair,
+leather-upholstered and screwed solidly to the floor, invited me. My
+pyjamas and dressing-gown were out. My slippers, in their accustomed
+place by the bed, also invited me.
+
+Here, aft, all was fitness, intelligence. On deck it was what I have
+described—a nightmare spawn of creatures, assumably human, but
+malformed, mentally and physically, into caricatures of men. Yes, it
+was an unusual crew; and that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire could whip it
+into the efficient shape necessary to work this vast and intricate and
+beautiful fabric of a ship was beyond all seeming of possibility.
+
+Depressed as I was by what I had just witnessed on deck, there came to
+me, as I leaned back in my chair and opened the second volume of George
+Moore’s _Hail and Farewell_, a premonition that the voyage was to be
+disastrous. But then, as I looked about the room, measured its generous
+space, realized that I was more comfortably situated than I had ever
+been on any passenger steamer, I dismissed foreboding thoughts and
+caught a pleasant vision of myself, through weeks and months, catching
+up with all the necessary reading which I had so long neglected.
+
+Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew. No, he hadn’t, but the
+steward had said that in all his years at sea this was the worst crew
+he had ever seen.
+
+“He say, all crazy, no sailors, rotten,” Wada said. “He say all big
+fools and bime by much trouble. ‘You see,’ he say all the time. ‘You
+see, You see.’ He pretty old man—fifty-five years, he say. Very smart
+man for Chinaman. Just now, first time for long time, he go to sea.
+Before, he have big business in San Francisco. Then he get much
+trouble—police. They say he opium smuggle. Oh, big, big trouble. But he
+catch good lawyer. He no go to jail. But long time lawyer work, and
+when trouble all finish lawyer got all his business, all his money,
+everything. Then he go to sea, like before. He make good money. He get
+sixty-five dollars a month on this ship. But he don’t like. Crew all
+crazy. When this time finish he leave ship, go back start business in
+San Francisco.”
+
+Later, when I had Wada open one of the ports for ventilation, I could
+hear the gurgle and swish of water alongside, and I knew the anchor was
+up and that we were in the grip of the _Britannia_, towing down the
+Chesapeake to sea. The idea suggested itself that it was not too late.
+I could very easily abandon the adventure and return to Baltimore on
+the _Britannia_ when she cast off the _Elsinore_. And then I heard a
+slight tinkling of china from the pantry as the steward proceeded to
+set the table, and, also, it was so warm and comfortable, and George
+Moore was so irritatingly fascinating.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+In every way dinner proved up beyond my expectations, and I registered
+a note that the cook, whoever or whatever he might be, was a capable
+man at his trade. Miss West served, and, though she and the steward
+were strangers, they worked together splendidly. I should have thought,
+from the smoothness of the service, that he was an old house servant
+who for years had known her every way.
+
+The pilot ate in the chart-house, so that at table were the four of us
+that would always be at table together. Captain West and his daughter
+faced each other, while I, on the captain’s right, faced Mr. Pike. This
+put Miss West across the corner on my right.
+
+Mr. Pike, his dark sack coat (put on for the meal) bulging and
+wrinkling over the lumps of muscles that padded his stooped shoulders,
+had nothing at all to say. But he had eaten too many years at captains’
+tables not to have proper table manners. At first I thought he was
+abashed by Miss West’s presence. Later, I decided it was due to the
+presence of the captain. For Captain West had a way with him that I was
+beginning to learn. Far removed as Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire were from
+the sailors, individuals as they were of an entirely different and
+superior breed, yet equally as different and far removed from his
+officers was Captain West. He was a serene and absolute aristocrat. He
+neither talked “ship” nor anything else to Mr. Pike.
+
+On the other hand, Captain West’s attitude toward me was that of a
+social equal. But then, I was a passenger. Miss West treated me the
+same way, but unbent more to Mr. Pike. And Mr. Pike, answering her with
+“Yes, Miss,” and “No, Miss,” ate good-manneredly and with his
+shaggy-browed gray eyes studied me across the table. I, too, studied
+him. Despite his violent past, killer and driver that he was, I could
+not help liking the man. He was honest, genuine. Almost more than for
+that, I liked him for the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave on the
+occasions when I reached the points of several funny stories. No man
+could laugh like that and be all bad. I was glad that it was he, and
+not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit opposite throughout the voyage. And I
+was very glad that Mr. Mellaire was not to eat with us at all.
+
+I am afraid that Miss West and I did most of the talking. She was
+breezy, vivacious, tonic, and I noted again that the delicate, almost
+fragile oval of her face was given the lie by her body. She was a
+robust, healthy young woman. That was undeniable. Not fat—heaven
+forbid!—not even plump; yet her lines had that swelling roundness that
+accompanies long, live muscles. She was full-bodied, vigorous; and yet
+not so full-bodied as she seemed. I remember with what surprise, when
+we arose from table, I noted her slender waist. At that moment I got
+the impression that she was willowy. And willowy she was, with a normal
+waist and with, in addition, always that informing bodily vigour that
+made her appear rounder and robuster than she really was.
+
+It was the health of her that interested me. When I studied her face
+more closely I saw that only the lines of the oval of it were delicate.
+Delicate it was not, nor fragile. The flesh was firm, and the texture
+of the skin was firm and fine as it moved over the firm muscles of face
+and neck. The neck was a beautiful and adequate pillar of white. Its
+flesh was firm, its skin fine, and it was muscular. The hands, too,
+attracted me—not small, but well-shaped, fine, white and strong, and
+well cared for. I could only conclude that she was an unusual captain’s
+daughter, just as her father was an unusual captain and man. And their
+noses were alike, just the hint-touch of the beak of power and race.
+
+While Miss West was telling of the unexpectedness of the voyage, of how
+suddenly she had decided to come—she accounted for it as a whim—and
+while she told of all the complications she had encountered in her
+haste of preparation, I found myself casting up a tally of the
+efficient ones on board the _Elsinore_. They were Captain West and his
+daughter, the two mates, myself, of course, Wada and the steward, and,
+beyond the shadow of a doubt, the cook. The dinner vouched for him.
+Thus I found our total of efficients to be eight. But the cook, the
+steward, and Wada were servants, not sailors, while Miss West and
+myself were supernumeraries. Remained to work, direct, do, but three
+efficients out of a total ship’s company of forty-five. I had no doubt
+that other efficients there were; it seemed impossible that my first
+impression of the crew should be correct. There was the carpenter. He
+might, at his trade, be as good as the cook. Then the two sailmakers,
+whom I had not yet seen, might prove up.
+
+A little later during the meal I ventured to talk about what had
+interested me and aroused my admiration, namely, the masterfulness with
+which Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire had gripped hold of that woeful,
+worthless crew. It was all new to me, I explained, but I appreciated
+the need of it. As I led up to the occurrence on Number Two hatch, when
+Mr. Pike had lifted up Larry and toppled him back with a mere slap from
+the ends of his fingers, I saw in Mr. Pike’s eyes a warning, almost
+threatening, expression. Nevertheless, I completed my description of
+the episode.
+
+When I had quite finished there was a silence. Miss West was busy
+serving coffee from a copper percolator. Mr. Pike, profoundly occupied
+with cracking walnuts, could not quite hide the wicked, little,
+half-humorous, half-revengeful gleam in his eyes. But Captain West
+looked straight at me, but from oh! such a distance—millions and
+millions of miles away. His clear blue eyes were as serene as ever, his
+tones as low and soft.
+
+“It is the one rule I ask to be observed, Mr. Pathurst—we never discuss
+the sailors.”
+
+It was a facer to me, and with quite a pronounced fellow-feeling for
+Larry I hurriedly added:
+
+“It was not merely the discipline that interested me. It was the feat
+of strength.”
+
+“Sailors are trouble enough without our hearing about them, Mr.
+Pathurst,” Captain West went on, as evenly and imperturbably as if I
+had not spoken. “I leave the handling of the sailors to my officers.
+That’s their business, and they are quite aware that I tolerate no
+undeserved roughness or severity.”
+
+Mr. Pike’s harsh face carried the faintest shadow of an amused grin as
+he stolidly regarded the tablecloth. I glanced to Miss West for
+sympathy. She laughed frankly, and said:
+
+“You see, father never has any sailors. And it’s a good plan, too.”
+
+“A very good plan,” Mr. Pike muttered.
+
+Then Miss West kindly led the talk away from that subject, and soon had
+us laughing with a spirited recital of a recent encounter of hers with
+a Boston cab-driver.
+
+Dinner over, I stepped to my room in quest of cigarettes, and
+incidentally asked Wada about the cook. Wada was always a great
+gatherer of information.
+
+“His name Louis,” he said. “He Chinaman, too. No; only half Chinaman.
+Other half Englishman. You know one island Napoleon he stop long time
+and bime by die that island?”
+
+“St. Helena,” I prompted.
+
+“Yes, that place Louis he born. He talk very good English.”
+
+At this moment, entering the hall from the deck, Mr. Mellaire, just
+relieved by the mate, passed me on his way to the big room in the stern
+where the second table was set. His “Good evening, sir,” was as stately
+and courteous as any southern gentleman of the old days could have
+uttered it. And yet I could not like the man. His outward seeming was
+so at variance with the personality that resided within. Even as he
+spoke and smiled I felt that from inside his skull he was watching me,
+studying me. And somehow, in a flash of intuition, I knew not why, I
+was reminded of the three strange young men, routed last from the
+forecastle, to whom Mr. Pike had read the law. They, too, had given me
+a similar impression.
+
+Behind Mr. Mellaire slouched a self-conscious, embarrassed individual,
+with the face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant. His feet were
+even larger than Mr. Pike’s, but the hands—I shot a quick glance to
+see—were not so large as Mr. Pike’s.
+
+As they passed I looked inquiry to Wada.
+
+“He carpenter. He sat second table. His name Sam Lavroff. He come from
+New York on ship. Steward say he very young for carpenter, maybe
+twenty-two, three years old.”
+
+As I approached the open port over my desk I again heard the swish and
+gurgle of water and again realized that we were under way. So steady
+and noiseless was our progress, that, say seated at table, it never
+entered one’s head that we were moving or were anywhere save on the
+solid land. I had been used to steamers all my life, and it was
+difficult immediately to adjust myself to the absence of the
+propeller-thrust vibration.
+
+“Well, what do you think?” I asked Wada, who, like myself, had never
+made a sailing-ship voyage.
+
+He smiled politely.
+
+“Very funny ship. Very funny sailors. I don’t know. Mebbe all right. We
+see.”
+
+“You think trouble?” I asked pointedly.
+
+“I think sailors very funny,” he evaded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for’ard along the deck to where
+work was going on. Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed in the
+starlight. Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I might
+judge, who was only the veriest tyro in such matters. The
+indistinguishable shapes of men, in long lines, pulled on ropes. They
+pulled in sick and dogged silence, though Mr. Pike, ubiquitous, snarled
+out orders and rapped out oaths from every angle upon their miserable
+heads.
+
+Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever proceeded
+so sadly and blunderingly to sea. Ere long Mr. Mellaire joined Mr. Pike
+in the struggle of directing the men. It was not yet eight in the
+evening, and all hands were at work. They did not seem to know the
+ropes. Time and again, when the half-hearted suggestions of the bosuns
+had been of no avail, I saw one or the other of the mates leap to the
+rail and put the right rope in the hands of the men.
+
+These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones. Up aloft, from
+sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who were at
+least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails.
+
+But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope that
+hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with painfully
+slow movements. “Walk away with it!” Mr. Pike would yell. And perhaps
+for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the rope ere they
+came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill. And yet, did either of
+the mates spring in and add his strength, they were able to move right
+along the deck without stopping. Either of the mates, old men that they
+were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of the wretched creatures.
+
+“This is what sailin’s come to,” Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
+“This ain’t the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling. But
+what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?”
+
+“I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled,” I said.
+
+“Sure they do. Want to hear ’em?”
+
+I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that
+I’d like to very much.
+
+“Here, you bosun!” Mr. Pike snarled. “Wake up! Start a song! Topsail
+halyards!”
+
+In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
+pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness
+freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
+
+Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
+have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
+unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it
+should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for
+the words poor Nancy sang were:
+
+“Away, way, way, yar,
+We’ll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots.”
+
+
+“Quit it! Quit it!” Mr. Pike roared. “This ain’t a funeral! Ain’t there
+one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It’s a topsail-yard—”
+
+He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of
+the men’s hands to put into them the right rope.
+
+“Come on, bosun! Break her out!”
+
+Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers’ voice, cracked and crazy and
+even more lugubrious than Nancy’s:
+
+“Then up aloft that yard must go,
+Whiskey for my Johnny.”
+
+
+The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
+men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
+
+“Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue.”
+
+
+Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin and
+lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
+
+“And whiskey killed the old man, too,
+Whiskey for my Johnny.”
+
+
+He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
+work and to the chorused emphasis of “Whiskey for my Johnny.”
+
+And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
+until he interrupted the song to cry “Belay!”
+
+And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
+maundering and futile things, getting in one another’s way, stumbling
+and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
+when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
+first. Skulkers there were among them, too; and once, from for’ard of
+the ’midship house, I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and out of
+the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on their heels Mr. Pike, who
+chanted a recital of the distressing things that would befall them if
+he caught them at such tricks again.
+
+The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further, so
+I strolled aft and climbed the poop. In the lee of the chart-house
+Captain West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down. Passing on
+aft, I saw steering at the wheel the weazened little old man I had
+noted earlier in the day. In the light of the binnacle his small blue
+eyes looked more malevolent than ever. So weazened and tiny was he, and
+so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they seemed of a height. His
+face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled, and in all seeming he was
+fifty years older than Mr. Pike. He was the most remarkable figure of a
+burnt-out, aged man one would expect to find able seaman on one of the
+proudest sailing-ships afloat. Later, through Wada, I was to learn that
+his name was Andy Fay and that he claimed no more years than
+sixty-three.
+
+I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared up
+at the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there. No,
+I decided I was not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of it was
+wrong. There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-ends. There
+was Miss West coming along. There was the crew of broken men and
+lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek in the ’midship house still
+gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up; and I was quite sure I
+would not care to witness such a transaction in surgery.
+
+Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of the
+voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in
+sailing-ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not
+exist. And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she
+could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had
+always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always live
+and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious personality.
+
+Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition that
+the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to me—for I
+knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be. And for five
+months at least—there was Mr. Pike’s offered wager of a pound of
+tobacco or a month’s wages to that effect—I was to be pent on the same
+ship with her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was
+I that ere the voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love
+to me. Please do not mistake me. My certainty in this matter was due,
+not to any exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my
+anything but exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men.
+In my experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism
+that marks the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of
+attachable surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.
+
+Call me blasé—I do not mind, if by blasé is meant the world-weariness,
+intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young man of
+thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these things—weary and
+in doubt. It was because of this state that I was undertaking the
+voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away from all these
+things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter over.
+
+It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness
+had been brought about by the success of my play—my first play, as
+every one knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the
+doubt in my own mind, just as the success of my several volumes of
+verse had raised doubts. Was the public right? Were the critics right?
+Surely the function of the artist was to voice life, yet what did I
+know of life?
+
+So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that
+afflicted me. Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts of
+isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me. I had even
+canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of my
+years to the lepers—I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and
+strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I
+knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the
+lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with—I was that
+mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.
+
+Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very
+well. Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible
+fact—my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact. This I
+knew: I had reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a
+life-climacteric of some sort. And I had diagnosed my own case and
+prescribed this voyage. And here was the atrociously healthy and
+profoundly feminine Miss West along—the very last ingredient I would
+have considered introducing into my prescription.
+
+A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their
+persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not
+entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world,
+and an income most dazzling—why shouldn’t women pursue me? They would
+have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic
+place alone, for the sake of my income alone.
+
+Yes; and love! Did I not know love—lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
+love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and sung
+and sobbed and sighed—yes, and known grief, and buried my dead. But it
+was so long ago. How young I was—turned twenty-four! And after that I
+had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I
+had laughed again and done my share of philandering with the pretty,
+ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of my fortune and
+artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired disgusted from the
+lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking adventures in the realm
+of mind. And here I was, on board the _Elsinore_, unhorsed by my
+encounters with the problems of the ultimate, carried off the field
+with a broken pate.
+
+As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
+could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as she
+made her little nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the
+everlasting mystery of woman. Yes, I, with all the futuristic contempt
+for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.
+
+Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
+possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than Lucifer
+and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid, attraction for the
+thinker. What is this flame of her, blazing through all her
+contradictions and ignobilities?—this ruthless passion for life, always
+for life, more life on the planet? At times it seems to me brazen, and
+awful, and soulless. At times I am made petulant by it. And at other
+times I am swayed by the sublimity of it. No; there is no escape from
+woman. Always, as a savage returns to a dark glen where goblins are and
+gods may be, so do I return to the contemplation of woman.
+
+Mr. Pike’s voice interrupted my musings. From for’ard, on the main
+deck, I heard him snarl:
+
+“On the main-topsail-yard, there!—if you cut that gasket I’ll split
+your damned skull!”
+
+Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he called
+to I concluded was the training-ship boy.
+
+“You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!” he cried. “Don’t make those
+gaskets up! Fetch ’em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!”
+
+Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my hand
+went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate’s voice
+rang out:
+
+“Come on, you gentlemen’s sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively now!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+I did not sleep well. To begin with, I read late. Not till two in the
+morning did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp which
+Wada had purchased and installed for me. I was asleep
+immediately—perfect sleep being perhaps my greatest gift; but almost
+immediately I was awake again. And thereafter, with dozings and
+cat-naps and restless tossings, I struggled to win to sleep, then gave
+it up. For of all things, in my state of jangled nerves, to be
+afflicted with hives! And still again, to be afflicted with hives in
+cold winter weather!
+
+At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated skin
+in Vernon Lee’s delightful screed against William James, and his “will
+to believe.” I was on the weather side of the ship, and from overhead,
+through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer on watch. I
+knew that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and wondered whether
+they were Mr. Mellaire’s or the pilot’s. Somebody above there was
+awake. The work was going on, the vigilant seeing and overseeing, that,
+I could plainly conclude, would go on through every hour of all the
+hours on the voyage.
+
+At half-past four I heard the steward’s alarm go off, instantly
+suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in
+through my open door. What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada had
+been with me through too many years for me to doubt that he had given
+the steward precise instructions and turned over to him my coffee and
+my coffee-making apparatus.
+
+The steward was a jewel. In ten minutes he served me with a perfect cup
+of coffee. I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found me,
+breakfast in bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck. We were
+still towing, but all sails were set to a light favouring breeze from
+the north. In the chart-room Captain West and the pilot were smoking
+cigars. At the wheel I noted what I decided at once was an efficient.
+He was not a large man; if anything he was undersized. But his
+countenance was broad-browed and intelligently formed. Tom, I later
+learned, was his name—Tom Spink, an Englishman. He was blue-eyed,
+fair-skinned, well-grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty years of
+age. His reply of “Good morning, sir” was cheery, and he smiled as he
+uttered the simple phrase. He did not look sailor-like, as did Henry,
+the training-ship boy; and yet I felt at once that he was a sailor, and
+an able one.
+
+It was Mr. Pike’s watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
+admitted that the man was the “best of the boiling.”
+
+Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and
+her vital, springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing
+her contacts. On asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly,
+she demanded an explanation. I told her of my affliction of hives and
+showed her the lumps on my wrists.
+
+“Your blood needs thinning and cooling,” she adjudged promptly. “Wait a
+minute. I’ll see what can be done for you.”
+
+And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand a
+part glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream of
+tartar.
+
+“Drink it,” she ordered, as a matter of course.
+
+I drank it. And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-chair
+with a second dose of the stuff. Also she reproached me soundly for
+permitting Wada to feed meat to Possum. It was from her that Wada and I
+learned how mortal a sin it was to give meat to a young puppy.
+Furthermore, she laid down the law and the diet for Possum, not alone
+to me and Wada, but to the steward, the carpenter, and Mr. Mellaire. Of
+the latter two, because they ate by themselves in the big after-room
+and because Possum played there, she was especially suspicious; and she
+was outspoken in voicing her suspicions to their faces. The carpenter
+mumbled embarrassed asseverations in broken English of past, present,
+and future innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before
+her on his huge feet. Mr. Mellaire’s protestations were of the same
+nature, save that they were made with the grace and suavity of a
+Chesterfield.
+
+In short, Possum’s diet raised quite a tempest in the _Elsinore_
+teapot, and by the time it was over Miss West had established this
+particular contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the
+mutual owners of the puppy. I noticed, later in the day, that it was to
+Miss West that Wada went for instructions as to the quantity of warm
+water he must use to dilute Possum’s condensed milk.
+
+Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook. In the afternoon I made
+a trip for’ard to the galley to make his acquaintance. To all intents
+he was a Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by speech alone,
+he was an Englishman. In fact, so cultured was his speech that I can
+fairly say it was vested with an Oxford accent. He, too, was old, fully
+sixty—he acknowledged fifty-nine. Three things about him were markedly
+conspicuous: his smile, that embraced all of his clean-shaven Asiatic
+face and Asiatic eyes; his even-rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which
+I deemed false until Wada ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands
+and feet. It was his hands, ridiculously small and beautifully
+modelled, that led my scrutiny to his feet. They, too, were
+ridiculously small and very neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.
+
+We had put the pilot off at midday, but the _Britannia_ towed us well
+into the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide
+about us and the land a faint blur on the western horizon. Here, at the
+moment of leaving the tug, we made our “departure”—that is to say,
+technically began the voyage, despite the fact that we had already
+travelled a full twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.
+
+It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the
+poop-rail gazing for’ard, when Miss West joined me. She had been busy
+below all day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of
+air. She surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five
+minutes, then remarked:
+
+“The barometer’s very high—30.60. This light north wind won’t last. It
+will either go into a calm or work around into a north-east gale.”
+
+“Which would you prefer?” I asked.
+
+“The gale, by all means. It will help us off the land, and it will put
+me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly. Oh, yes,” she
+added, “I’m a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the beginning
+of every voyage. You probably won’t see me for a couple of days now.
+That’s why I’ve been so busy getting settled first.”
+
+“Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea,” I
+said.
+
+“And I’ve seen father sea-sick on occasion,” she answered. “Yes, and
+some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known.”
+
+Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting
+pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.
+
+Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck
+below us. To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing
+than ever.
+
+“A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike,” Miss West remarked.
+
+“The worst ever,” he growled, “and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones.
+We’re teachin’ them the ropes just now—most of ’em.”
+
+“They look starved,” I commented.
+
+“They are, they almost always are,” Miss West answered, and her eyes
+roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer’s fashion I had
+marked in Mr. Pike. “But they’ll fatten up with regular hours, no
+whiskey, and solid food—won’t they, Mr. Pike?”
+
+“Oh, sure. They always do. And you’ll see them liven up when we get ’em
+in hand . . . maybe. They’re a measly lot, though.”
+
+I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed to
+have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us,
+under Mr. Mellaire’s direction, were setting triangular sails, like
+jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped
+one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled
+these small sails led me to ask:
+
+“But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
+were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an
+earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head
+from both sides of a street.
+
+“Do?” Miss West answered for him. “We’d get the sail off. Oh, it can be
+done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn’t, I should
+have been drowned long ago.”
+
+“Sure,” Mr. Pike upheld her. “So would I.”
+
+“The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in
+a pinch,” Miss West went on.
+
+Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big
+paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite
+unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted
+fresh abrasions on the knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from
+some recollection.
+
+“I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most
+hopeless crew. It was in the _Lallah Rookh_—you remember her, Mr.
+Pike?”
+
+“Your father’s fifth command,” he nodded. “Lost on the West Coast
+afterwards—went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave. Parted
+her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on her.”
+
+“That’s the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
+bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where the
+boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number of them
+were shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them when they
+were first sent aloft.” Again she laughed. “It was better than circus
+clowns. And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when
+it began to blow up and we began to shorten down. And then our mates
+performed miracles. You remember Mr. Harding—Silas Harding?”
+
+“Don’t I though!” Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically. “He was some
+man, and he must have been an old man even then.”
+
+“He was, and a terrible man,” she concurred, and added, almost
+reverently: “And a wonderful man.” She turned her face to me. “He was
+our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But Mr.
+Harding got the sail off the _Lallah Rookh_ just the same. What I
+wanted to tell you was this:
+
+“I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
+those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail. How
+far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?”
+
+“Let me see . . . the _Lallah Rookh_.” Mr. Pike paused to consider.
+“Oh, say around a hundred feet.”
+
+“I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp—and he must already
+have got a taste of Mr. Harding—fell off the lower-topsail-yard. I was
+only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was
+falling from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck. But he
+fell into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a
+somersault, and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt. And he landed
+right alongside of Mr. Harding, facing him. I don’t know which was the
+more astonished, but I think Mr. Harding was, for he stood there
+petrified. He had expected the man to be killed. Not so the man. He
+took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump for the rigging and
+climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.”
+
+Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me
+say:
+
+“Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man’s nerves, falling to apparent
+death that way.”
+
+“He’d been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess,” was Mr. Pike’s
+remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.
+
+Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by what
+I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary. But that
+a young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things
+and be so saturated in this side of ship life was not nice. It was not
+nice for me, though it interested me, I confess,—and strengthened my
+grip on reality. Yet it meant a hardening of one’s fibres, and I did
+not like to think of Miss West being so hardened.
+
+I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
+firmness of her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
+were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her eyes
+were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression,
+intelligent and alive. Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most
+noteworthy expression of it was a great calm. She seemed always in
+repose, at peace with herself and with the external world. The most
+beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows
+and hair. The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very
+straight, and just the slightest trifle too long. In this it was
+reminiscent of her father’s nose. But the perfect modelling of the
+bridge and nostrils conveyed an indescribable advertisement of race and
+blood.
+
+Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous
+mouth—generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but
+generous rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter. All the health
+and buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes. She
+rarely exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed
+chiefly to employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong
+white teeth, even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm,
+sensible, normal size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal
+as she.
+
+I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many of
+the factors that go to compose feminine beauty. She had all the beauty
+of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was
+emphasized by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair. And, in the
+same way, the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of skin
+set off the warm gray of her eyes. The forehead was, well, medium-broad
+and medium high, and quite smooth. No lines nor hints of lines were
+there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of depression and white
+nights of insomnia. Oh, she bore all the marks of the healthy, human
+female, who never worried nor was vexed in the spirit of her, and in
+whose body every process and function was frictionless and automatic.
+
+“Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet,” I said to the
+mate. “Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?”
+
+“She ought to be,” was Mr. Pike’s reply as he lifted his glance across
+the smooth swell of sea to the sky. “This ain’t the first time she’s
+been on the North Atlantic in winter.” He debated a moment, as he
+studied the sea and sky. “I should say, considering the high barometer,
+we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with the
+chances in favour of the calm.”
+
+She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail
+as the _Elsinore_ lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the
+trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in hollow
+thunder.
+
+“The calm has it,” Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness. “And
+if this keeps up I’ll be in my bunk in about five minutes.”
+
+She waved aside all sympathy. “Oh, don’t bother about me, Mr. Pathurst.
+Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy
+weather, and poison ivy; besides, I’d rather be sea-sick than have the
+hives.”
+
+Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity
+or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire’s raised voice.
+Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was
+distinctly unpleasant to the ear.
+
+On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One,
+in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.
+
+“Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark,” I observed.
+
+Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West’s
+eyes to Mr. Pike’s big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on
+the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. _She knew_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
+table, while the _Elsinore_ rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West
+to her room.
+
+“You won’t see her for a couple of days,” Captain West told me. “Her
+mother was the same way—a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of
+a voyage.”
+
+“It’s the shaking down.” Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
+observation I had yet heard him utter at table. “Everybody has to shake
+down when they leave the land. We’ve got to forget the good times on
+shore, and the good things money’ll buy, and start watch and watch,
+four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our
+tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you
+heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?”
+
+I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.
+
+“Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
+every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give
+it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch.”
+
+“You don’t like the sea?” I queried.
+
+He sighed.
+
+“I don’t know. But of course the sea is all I know—”
+
+“Except music,” I threw in.
+
+“Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most
+of the music I oughta have had coming to me.”
+
+“I suppose you’ve heard Schumann Heink?”
+
+“Wonderful, wonderful!” he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an
+eager wistfulness. “I’ve half-a-dozen of her records, and I’ve got the
+second dog-watch below. If Captain West don’t mind . . . ” (Captain
+West nodded that he didn’t mind). “And if you’d want to hear them? The
+machine is a good one.”
+
+And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this
+hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of
+the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid
+collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed on
+the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the
+main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain West
+and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph.
+His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and every
+shade of expression was visible to me.
+
+In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records were
+only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation. He
+handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping
+it and brushing it with a fine camel’s hair brush while it revolved and
+ere he placed the needle on it. For a time all I could see was the huge
+brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the knuckles, that
+expressed love in their every movement. Each touch on the discs was a
+caress, and while the record played he hovered over it and dreamed in
+some heaven of music all his own.
+
+During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face was
+expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I
+almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles,
+betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He seemed
+preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I watched him
+I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr.
+Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not until she was ready
+for sea had Captain West come on board. I had not seen him give an
+order. It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did the work. All
+Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully oblivious of
+the _Elsinore’s_ crew.
+
+When Mr. Pike had played the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the _Messiah_,
+and “He Shall Feed His Flock,” he mentioned to me, almost
+apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason,
+perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he
+had been a choir boy.
+
+“And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and
+sneaked off to sea again,” he concluded with a harsh laugh.
+
+And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer’s “King of
+Heaven,” and Mendelssohn’s “O Rest in the Lord.”
+
+When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all
+carefully wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he
+rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.
+
+“I’ve got a lot more good things,” he said confidentially: “Coenen’s
+‘Come Unto Me,’ and Faure’s ‘Crucifix’; and there’s ‘O Salutaris,’ and
+‘Lead, Kindly Light’ by the Trinity Choir; and ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’
+would just melt your heart. I’ll play ’em for you some night.”
+
+“Do you believe in them?” I was led to ask by his rapt expression and
+by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from
+my consciousness.
+
+He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:
+
+“I do . . . when I’m listening to them.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+My sleep that night was wretched. Short of sleep from the previous
+night, I closed my book and turned my light off early. But scarcely had
+I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my
+hives. All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the
+light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up. Wada had not
+yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of tartar. It was
+useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the watch changing, I
+partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and went up on to the
+poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours’ watch, pacing up and down
+the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the
+wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the
+wheel-house.
+
+Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and
+lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and
+experienced premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be
+possible, with such a crew, on the huge _Elsinore_, a cargo-carrier
+that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five
+thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate. The voyage had
+gone wrong from the first. In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep
+brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was
+doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman could
+have dreamed.
+
+I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no
+doubts but what she would always live. I thought of the killing and
+driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had
+gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He
+was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who
+had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of
+his own creating.
+
+Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and
+lying gibbering between the steel walls of the ’midship-house. This
+picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified
+the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew. Certainly I could go back to
+Baltimore. Thank God I had the money to humour my whims. Had not Mr.
+Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the running
+expenses of the _Elsinore_ at two hundred dollars a day? I could afford
+to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the several days that
+might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot tug, or any
+inbound craft to Baltimore.
+
+I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to
+tell him my decision, when another presented itself: _Then are you_,
+_the thinker and philosopher_, _the world-sick one_, _afraid to go
+down_, _to cease in the darkness_? Bah! My own pride in my
+life-pridelessness saved Captain West’s sleep from interruption. Of
+course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be
+called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and
+lunatics—and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and Semitic
+ones who had aroused Mr. Pike’s ire and who had laughed so terribly and
+silently.
+
+Night thoughts! Sleepless thoughts! I dismissed them all and started
+below, chilled through by the cold. But at the chart-room door I
+encountered Mr. Mellaire.
+
+“A pleasant evening, sir,” he greeted me. “A pity there’s not a little
+wind to help us off the land.”
+
+“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, after a moment or so.
+
+Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“I’ve seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst. But I never saw
+one as queer as this—boys, old men, cripples and—you saw Tony the Greek
+go overboard yesterday? Well, that’s only the beginning. He’s a sample.
+I’ve got a big Irishman in my watch who’s going bad. Did you notice a
+little, dried-up Scotchman?”
+
+“Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the
+evening before last?”
+
+“The very one—Andy Fay. Well, Andy Fay’s just been complaining to me
+about O’Sullivan. Says O’Sullivan’s threatened his life. When Andy Fay
+went off watch at eight he found O’Sullivan stropping a razor. I’ll
+give you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:
+
+“‘Says O’Sullivan to me, “Mr. Fay, I’ll have a word wid yeh?”
+“Certainly,” says I; “what can I do for you?” “Sell me your sea-boots,
+Mr. Fay,” says O’Sullivan, polite as can be. “But what will you be
+wantin’ of them?” says I. “’Twill be a great favour,” says O’Sullivan.
+“But it’s my only pair,” says I; “and you have a pair of your own,”
+says I. “Mr. Fay, I’ll be needin’ me own in bad weather,” says
+O’Sullivan. “Besides,” says I, “you have no money.” “I’ll pay for them
+when we pay off in Seattle,” says O’Sullivan. “I’ll not do it,” says I;
+“besides, you’re not tellin’ me what you’ll be doin’ with them.” “But I
+will tell yeh,” says O’Sullivan; “I’m wantin’ to throw ’em over the
+side.” And with that I turns to walk away, but O’Sullivan says, very
+polite and seducin’-like, still a-stroppin’ the razor, “Mr. Fay,” says
+he, “will you kindly step this way an’ have your throat cut?” And with
+that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to
+you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.’
+
+“Or soon will be,” I remarked. “I noticed him yesterday, a big man
+muttering continually to himself?”
+
+“That’s the man,” Mr. Mellaire said.
+
+“Do you have many such at sea?” I asked.
+
+“More than my share, I do believe, sir.”
+
+He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement he
+pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing
+match that I might see.
+
+I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald,
+but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across
+this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the
+most prodigious scar I had ever seen. Because the vision of it was so
+fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar’s very
+prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have sworn that
+I could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and that it was
+fully two fingers broad. There seemed no bone at all, just a great
+fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was confident that the
+brain pulsed immediately under that skin.
+
+He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.
+
+“A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe. We were
+thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the
+time, running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his
+addled head that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn’t
+let him go ashore. I had my back to him at the time, and I never knew
+what struck me.”
+
+“But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?” I questioned.
+“There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have
+had wonderful vitality.”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses.”
+
+“Molasses!”
+
+“Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics. He
+always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk many
+weary weeks—we had a long passage—and by the time we reached Hong Kong
+the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was
+standing my third mate’s watch—we carried third mates in those days.”
+
+Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr.
+Mellaire’s head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the
+_Elsinore_. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received
+the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he
+would have been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed
+passenger with a proposition capable of going to the extent of buying
+the _Elsinore_ outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed
+straight back to Baltimore.
+
+As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr.
+Mellaire should have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.
+
+We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening,
+and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to
+infest the sea.
+
+And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the manner
+of saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous, broad-minded,
+and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world. It was easy for me
+to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of
+social mannerism. It was not that. But all the time I was
+distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though in the
+darkness I couldn’t even see his eyes, that there, behind those eyes,
+inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality that spied upon
+me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing while it thought
+another thing.
+
+When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I
+had been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature. The
+other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick,
+behind the mask of words and flesh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the heat
+of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet, whenever
+I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and read, my skin
+irritation decreased. But as soon as I turned out the lamp and closed
+my eyes I was troubled again. So hour after hour passed, through which,
+between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to wade through many pages of
+Rosny’s _Le Termite_—a not very cheerful proceeding, I must say,
+concerned as it is with the microscopic and over-elaborate recital of
+Noël Servaise’s tortured nerves, bodily pains, and intellectual
+phantasma. At last I tossed the novel aside, damned all analytical
+Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in the more genial and
+cynical Stendhal.
+
+Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down. At
+four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike’s
+promenade. Half an hour later, just as the steward’s alarm went off,
+instantly checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the _Elsinore_ began
+to heel over on my side. I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling
+orders, and at times a trample and shuffle of many feet passed over my
+head as the weird crew pulled and hauled. The _Elsinore_ continued to
+heel over until I could see the water against my port, and then she
+gathered way and dashed ahead at such a rate that I could hear the
+stinging and singing of the foam through the circle of thick glass
+beside me.
+
+The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after, when
+Wada served me breakfast and helped me dress. He, too, complained of
+inability to sleep. He had been bunked with Nancy in one of the rooms
+in the ’midship-house. Wada described the situation. The tiny room,
+made of steel, was air-tight when the steel door was closed. And Nancy
+insisted on keeping the door closed. As a result Wada, in the upper
+bunk, had stifled. He told me that the air had got so bad that the
+flame of the lamp, no matter how high it was turned, guttered down and
+all but refused to burn. Nancy snored beautifully through it all, while
+he had been unable to close his eyes.
+
+“He is not clean,” quoth Wada. “He is a pig. No more will I sleep in
+that place.”
+
+On the poop I found the _Elsinore_, with many of her sails furled,
+slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky. Also I
+found Mr. Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours
+before, and it took quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he
+had had the watch off between four and eight. Even then, he told me, he
+had slept from four until half-past seven.
+
+“That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . .
+which means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience.”
+
+And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that
+that alien thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.
+
+In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible. Miss West
+did not appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the curse
+of sea-sickness had not been added.
+
+Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place
+for himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the corner
+with a solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.
+
+It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain
+and a persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of water
+across the deck. With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which gave
+for’ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors, whenever
+they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and through by
+the boarding seas. Several times I saw some of them taken off their
+feet and rolled about in the creaming foam. And yet, erect,
+unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among these rolled
+men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr. Pike or Mr.
+Mellaire. They were never taken off their feet. They never shrank away
+from a splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-falling water. They had
+fed on different food, were informed with a different spirit, were of
+iron in contrast with the poor miserables they drove to their bidding.
+
+In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in
+the cabin. Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I could
+have slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble. Captain
+West, stretched out on the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet slippers,
+slept enviably. By some instinct, I might say, in the deep of sleep, he
+kept his place and was not rolled off upon the floor. Also, he lightly
+held a half-smoked cigar in one hand. I watched him for an hour, and
+knew him to be asleep, and marvelled that he maintained his easy
+posture and did not drop the cigar.
+
+After dinner there was no phonograph. The second dog-watch was Mr.
+Pike’s on deck. Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too severe.
+It would make the needle jump and scratch his beloved records.
+
+And no sleep! Another weary night of torment, and another dreary,
+overcast day and leaden, troubled sea. And no Miss West. Wada, too, is
+sea-sick, although heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend on me
+with glassy, unseeing eyes. I sent him to his bunk, and read through
+the endless hours until my eyes were tired, and my brain, between lack
+of sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.
+
+Captain West is no conversationalist. The more I see of him the more I
+am baffled. I have not yet found a reason for that first impression I
+received of him. He has all the poise and air of a remote and superior
+being, and yet I wonder if it be not poise and air and nothing else.
+Just as I had expected, that first meeting, ere he spoke a word, to
+hear fall from his lips words of untold beneficence and wisdom, and
+then heard him utter mere social commonplaces, so I now find myself
+almost forced to conclude that his touch of race, and beak of power,
+and all the tall, aristocratic slenderness of him have nothing behind
+them.
+
+And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that
+first impression. He has not shown any strength, but by the same token
+he has not shown any weakness. Sometimes I wonder what resides behind
+those clear blue eyes. Certainly I have failed to find any intellectual
+backing. I tried him out with William James’ _Varieties of Religious
+Experience_. He glanced at a few pages, then returned it to me with the
+frank statement that it did not interest him. He has no books of his
+own. Evidently he is not a reader. Then what is he? I dared to feel him
+out on politics. He listened courteously, said sometimes yes and
+sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very discouragement, said
+nothing.
+
+Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still more
+aloof from his officers. I have not seen him address a further word to
+Mr. Mellaire than “Good morning” on the poop. As for Mr. Pike, who eats
+three times a day with him, scarcely any more conversation obtains
+between them. And I am surprised by what seems the very conspicuous awe
+with which Mr. Pike seems to regard his commander.
+
+Another thing. What are Captain West’s duties? So far he has done
+nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day
+stroll a total of one mile around the poop. The mates do all the work,
+and hard work it is, four hours on deck and four below, day and night
+with never a variation. I watch Captain West and am amazed. He will
+loll back in the cabin and stare straight before him for hours at a
+time, until I am almost frantic to demand of him what are his thoughts.
+Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all. I give him up. I cannot
+fathom him.
+
+Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across
+the deck. I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with five
+thousand tons of coal around the Horn is more serious than I had
+thought. So deep is the _Elsinore_ in the water that she is like a log
+awash. Her tall, six-foot bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas from
+boarding her. She has not the buoyancy one is accustomed to ascribe to
+ships. On the contrary, she is weighted down until she is dead, so
+that, for this one day alone, I am appalled at the thought of how many
+thousands of tons of the North Atlantic have boarded her and poured out
+through her spouting scuppers and clanging ports.
+
+Yes, a depressing day. The two mates have alternated on deck and in
+their bunks. Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the
+Bible. Miss West is still sea-sick. I have tired myself out with
+reading, and the fuzziness of my unsleeping brain makes for melancholy.
+Even Wada is anything but a cheering spectacle, crawling out of his
+bunk, as he does at stated intervals, and with sick, glassy eyes trying
+to discern what my needs may be. I almost wish I could get sea-sick
+myself. I had never dreamed that a sea voyage could be so unenlivening
+as this one is proving.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the _Elsinore_,
+under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from her
+scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic. And I
+have failed to sleep half-an-hour all told. At this rate, in a very
+short time I shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the ship. I
+never have had hives like these before. I can’t understand it. So long
+as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled. The instant I put
+out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and the lumps on my
+skin begin to form.
+
+Miss West may be sea-sick, but she cannot be comatose, because at
+frequent intervals she sends the steward to me with more cream of
+tartar.
+
+I have had a revelation to-day. I have discovered Captain West. He is a
+Samurai.—You remember the Samurai that H. G. Wells describes in his
+_Modern Utopia_—the superior breed of men who know things and are
+masters of life and of their fellow-men in a super-benevolent,
+super-wise way? Well, that is what Captain West is. Let me tell it to
+you.
+
+We had a shift of wind to-day. In the height of a south-west gale the
+wind shifted, in the instant, eight points, which is equivalent to a
+quarter of the circle. Imagine it! Imagine a gale howling from out of
+the south-west. And then imagine the wind, in a heavier and more
+violent gale, abruptly smiting you from the north-west. We had been
+sailing through a circular storm, Captain West vouchsafed to me, before
+the event, and the wind could be expected to box the compass.
+
+Clad in sea-boots, oilskins and sou’wester, I had for some time been
+hanging upon the rail at the break of the poop, staring down fascinated
+at the poor devils of sailors, repeatedly up to their necks in water,
+or submerged, or dashed like straws about the deck, while they pulled
+and hauled, stupidly, blindly, and in evident fear, under the orders of
+Mr. Pike.
+
+Mr. Pike was with them, working them and working with them. He took
+every chance they took, yet somehow he escaped being washed off his
+feet, though several times I saw him entirely buried from view. There
+was more than luck in the matter; for I saw him, twice, at the head of
+a line of the men, himself next to the pin. And twice, in this
+position, I saw the North Atlantic curl over the rail and fall upon
+them. And each time he alone remained, holding the turn of the rope on
+the pin, while the rest of them were rolled and sprawled helplessly
+away.
+
+Almost it seemed to me good fun, as at a circus, watching their antics.
+But I did not apprehend the seriousness of the situation until, the
+wind screaming higher than ever and the sea a-smoke and white with
+wrath, two men did not get up from the deck. One was carried away
+for’ard with a broken leg—it was Iare Jacobson, a dull-witted
+Scandinavian; and the other, Kid Twist, was carried away, unconscious,
+with a bleeding scalp.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not
+break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape
+being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving
+spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs
+out of my sleep-starved brain.
+
+And all the time, slender, aristocratic, graceful in streaming
+oilskins, in apparent unconcern, giving no orders, effortlessly
+accommodating his body to the violent rolling of the _Elsinore_,
+Captain West strolled up and down.
+
+It was at this stage in the gale that he unbent sufficiently to tell me
+that we were going through a circular storm and that the wind was
+boxing the compass. I did notice that he kept his gaze pretty steadily
+fixed on the overcast, cloud-driven sky. At last, when it seemed the
+wind could not possibly blow more fiercely, he found in the sky what he
+sought. It was then that I first heard his voice—a sea-voice, clear as
+a bell, distinct as silver, and of an ineffable sweetness and volume,
+as it might be the trump of Gabriel. That voice!—effortless,
+dominating! The mighty threat of the storm, made articulate by the
+resistance of the _Elsinore_, shouted in all the stays, bellowed in the
+shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the
+myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil’s chorus of shrill pipings
+and screechings. And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain
+West’s voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as
+all music and mighty as an archangel’s call to judgment. And it carried
+understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike,
+waist-deep in the wash of sea below us. And the man at the wheel
+obeyed, and Mr. Pike obeyed, barking and snarling orders to the poor
+wallowing devils who wallowed on and obeyed him in turn. And as the
+voice was the face. This face I had never seen before. It was the face
+of the spirit visitant, chaste with wisdom, lighted by a splendour of
+power and calm. Perhaps it was the calm that smote me most of all. It
+was as the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men
+with the word that all was well. It was not the face of the fighter. To
+my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all
+strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of the blood.
+
+The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings
+of the storm, directing the gigantic, labouring _Elsinore_ in all her
+intricate massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will,
+which was the will of wisdom.
+
+And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his
+creatures laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more
+slenderly tall and aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins,
+Captain West touched my shoulder and pointed astern over our weather
+quarter. I looked, and all that I could see was a vague smoke of sea
+and air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at the ocean’s breast. And at
+the same moment the gale from the south-west ceased. There was no gale,
+no moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.
+
+“What is it?” I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation of
+wind.
+
+“The shift,” he said. “There she comes.”
+
+And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an
+atmospheric impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the
+_Elsinore_ harp protest. It forced me down on the rail. I was like a
+windle-straw. As I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the air
+back into my lungs, so that I suffocated and turned my head aside to
+breathe in the lee of the draught. The man at the wheel again listened
+to the Gabriel voice; and Mr. Pike, on the deck below, listened and
+repeated the will of the voice; and Captain West, in slender and
+stately balance, leaned into the face of the wind and slowly paced the
+deck.
+
+It was magnificent. Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and
+the men who overlord the sea. Captain West had vindicated himself,
+exposited himself. At the height and crisis of storm he had taken
+charge of the _Elsinore_, and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was
+all he was, the foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves,
+serving the one from beyond—the Samurai.
+
+A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily
+into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back
+against it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on
+the knob of the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the
+storm-white sea and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.
+
+Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and
+saw him. Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet
+slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather
+chair smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing—or, if
+they saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my
+ken. I have developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I
+know him less than the little I thought I knew him before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this,
+which has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the
+selectest and most mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor
+_Elsinore_ pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty
+spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is
+astonishing. To me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr.
+Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is
+a good cargo, and that the _Elsinore_ is well-loaded because he saw to
+it himself.
+
+He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in
+order to watch her in her maddest antics. The sight is very pleasant to
+him, for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face
+and impart to it a hint of ecstasy. The _Elsinore_ has a snug place in
+his heart, I am confident. He calls her behaviour admirable, and at
+such times will repeat to me that it was he who saw to her loading.
+
+It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on
+the sea, to the motion of the sea. There _is_ a rhythm to this chaos of
+crossing, buffeting waves. I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve
+it. But Mr. Pike _knows_ it. Again and again, as we paced up and down
+this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he
+would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the _Elsinore_ smashed
+down on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that
+seemed never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt,
+snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the corresponding roll to
+windward. In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these
+antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously
+forecast them at all. He _feels_ them; he knows them. They, and the
+sea, are ingrained in him.
+
+Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
+shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw. If ever, in an
+hour, the _Elsinore_ had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had
+not noticed it. So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next
+moment the _Elsinore_ had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred
+feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the
+deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the chart-house.
+My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet. Now how did he know?
+
+And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away. On the
+contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and
+again he lent his surplus to me. I begin to have more respect, not for
+the sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of
+seamen that are as slaves on our decks, but for the real seamen who are
+their masters—for Captain West, for Mr. Pike, yes, and for Mr.
+Mellaire, dislike him as I do.
+
+As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back to
+the south-west. Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and
+reported the change to Captain West.
+
+“We’ll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst,” the second mate told me when
+he came back. “You’ll find it an interesting manoeuvre.”
+
+“But why wait till four?” I asked.
+
+“The Captain’s orders, sir. The watches will be changing, and we’ll
+have the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the watch
+below by calling it out now.”
+
+And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins,
+came out of the chart-house. Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took charge
+of the many men who, on deck and on the poop, were to manage the
+mizzen-braces, while Mr. Mellaire went for’ard with his watch to handle
+the fore-and main-braces. It was a pretty manoeuvre, a play of
+leverages, by which they eased the force of the wind on the after part
+of the _Elsinore_ and used the force of the wind on the for’ard part.
+
+Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite
+oblivious of what was being done. He was again the favoured passenger,
+taking a stroll for his health’s sake. And yet I knew that both his
+officers were uncomfortably aware of his presence and were keyed to
+their finest seamanship. I know, now, Captain West’s position on board.
+He is the brains of the _Elsinore_. He is the master strategist. There
+is more in directing a ship on the ocean than in standing watches and
+ordering men to pull and haul. They are pawns, and the two officers are
+pieces, with which Captain West plays the game against sea, and wind,
+and season, and ocean current. He is the knower. They are his tongue,
+by which he makes his knowledge articulate.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+A bad night—equally bad for the _Elsinore_ and for me. She is receiving
+a sharp buffeting at the hands of the wintry North Atlantic. I fell
+asleep early, exhausted from lack of sleep, and awoke in an hour,
+frantic with my lumped and burning skin. More cream of tartar, more
+reading, more vain attempts to sleep, until shortly before five, when
+the steward brought me my coffee, I wrapped myself in my dressing-gown,
+and like a being distracted prowled into the cabin. I dozed in a
+leather chair and was thrown out by a violent roll of the ship. I tried
+the sofa, sinking to sleep immediately, and immediately thereafter
+finding myself precipitated to the floor. I am convinced that when
+Captain West naps on the sofa he is only half asleep. How else can he
+maintain so precarious a position?—unless, in him, too, the sea and its
+motion be ingrained.
+
+I wandered into the dining-room, wedged myself into a screwed chair,
+and fell asleep, my head on my arms, my arms on the table. And at
+quarter past seven the steward roused me by shaking my shoulders. It
+was time to set table.
+
+Heavy with the brief heaviness of sleep I had had, I dressed and
+stumbled up on to the poop in the hope that the wind would clear my
+brain. Mr. Pike had the watch, and with sure, age-lagging step he paced
+the deck. The man is a marvel—sixty-nine years old, a life of hardship,
+and as sturdy as a lion. Yet of the past night alone his hours had
+been: four to six in the afternoon on deck; eight to twelve on deck;
+and four to eight in the morning on deck. In a few minutes he would be
+relieved, but at midday he would again be on deck.
+
+I leaned on the poop-rail and stared for’ard along the dreary waste of
+deck. Every port and scupper was working to ease the weight of North
+Atlantic that perpetually fell on board. Between the rush of the
+cascades, streaks of rust showed everywhere. Some sort of a wooden
+pin-rail had carried away on the starboard-rail at the foot of the
+mizzen-shrouds, and an amazing raffle of ropes and tackles washed
+about. Here Nancy and half-a-dozen men worked sporadically, and in fear
+of their lives, to clear the tangle.
+
+The long-suffering bleakness was very pronounced on Nancy’s face, and
+when the walls of water, in impending downfall, reared above the
+_Elsinore’s_ rail, he was always the first to leap for the life-line
+which had been stretched fore and aft across the wide space of deck.
+
+The rest of the men were scarcely less backward in dropping their work
+and springing to safety—if safety it might be called, to grip a rope in
+both hands and have legs sweep out from under, and be wrenched
+full-length upon the boiling surface of an ice-cold flood. Small wonder
+they look wretched. Bad as their condition was when they came aboard at
+Baltimore, they look far worse now, what of the last several days of
+wet and freezing hardship.
+
+From time to time, completing his for’ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike
+would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what
+happened to the poor devils below. The man’s heart is callous. A thing
+of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these
+creatures who lack his own excessive iron.
+
+I noticed the stone-deaf man, the twisted oaf whose face I have
+described as being that of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His
+bright, liquid, pain-filled eyes were more filled with pain than ever,
+his face still more lean and drawn with suffering. And yet his face
+showed an excess of nervousness, sensitiveness, and a pathetic
+eagerness to please and do. I could not help observing that, despite
+his dreadful sense-handicap and his wrecked, frail body, he did the
+most work, was always the last of the group to spring to the life-line
+and always the first to loose the life-line and slosh knee-deep or
+waist-deep through the churning water to attack the immense and
+depressing tangle of rope and tackle.
+
+I remarked to Mr. Pike that the men seemed thinner and weaker than when
+they came on board, and he delayed replying for a moment while he
+stared down at them with that cattle-buyer’s eye of his.
+
+“Sure they are,” he said disgustedly. “A weak breed, that’s what they
+are—nothing to build on, no stamina. The least thing drags them down.
+Why, in my day we grew fat on work like that—only we didn’t; we worked
+so hard there wasn’t any chance for fat. We kept in fighting trim, that
+was all. But as for this scum and slum—say, you remember, Mr. Pathurst,
+that man I spoke to the first day, who said his name was Charles
+Davis?”
+
+“The one you thought there was something the matter with?”
+
+“Yes, and there was, too. He’s in that ’midship room with the Greek
+now. He’ll never do a tap of work the whole Voyage. He’s a hospital
+case, if there ever was one. Talk about shot to pieces! He’s got holes
+in him I could shove my fist through. I don’t know whether they’re
+perforating ulcers, or cancers, or cannon-shot wounds, or what not. And
+he had the nerve to tell me they showed up after he came on board!”
+
+“And he had them all the time?” I asked.
+
+“All the time! Take my word, Mr. Pathurst, they’re years old. But he’s
+a wonder. I watched him those first days, sent him aloft, had him down
+in the fore-hold trimming a few tons of coal, did everything to him,
+and he never showed a wince. Being up to the neck in the salt water
+finally fetched him, and now he’s reported off duty—for the voyage. And
+he’ll draw his wages for the whole time, have all night in, and never
+do a tap. Oh, he’s a hot one to have passed over on us, and the
+_Elsinore’s_ another man short.”
+
+“Another!” I exclaimed. “Is the Greek going to die?”
+
+“No fear. I’ll have him steering in a few days. I refer to the misfits.
+If we rolled a dozen of them together they wouldn’t make one real man.
+I’m not saying it to alarm you, for there’s nothing alarming about it;
+but we’re going to have proper hell this voyage.” He broke off to stare
+reflectively at his broken knuckles, as if estimating how much drive
+was left in them, then sighed and concluded, “Well, I can see I’ve got
+my work cut out for me.”
+
+Sympathizing with Mr. Pike is futile; the only effect is to make his
+mood blacker. I tried it, and he retaliated with:
+
+“You oughta see the bloke with curvature of the spine in Mr. Mellaire’s
+watch. He’s a proper hobo, too, and a land lubber, and don’t weigh
+more’n a hundred pounds, and must be fifty years old, and he’s got
+curvature of the spine, and he’s able seaman, if you please, on the
+_Elsinore_. And worse than all that, he puts it over on you; he’s
+nasty, he’s mean, he’s a viper, a wasp. He ain’t afraid of anything
+because he knows you dassent hit him for fear of croaking him. Oh, he’s
+a pearl of purest ray serene, if anybody should slide down a backstay
+and ask you. If you fail to identify him any other way, his name is
+Mulligan Jacobs.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+After breakfast, again on deck, in Mr. Mellaire’s watch, I discovered
+another efficient. He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular
+man of say forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big
+eagle-face, swarthy, with keen, intelligent black eyes.
+
+Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the best
+sailor in his watch, a proper seaman. When he referred to the man as
+the Maltese Cockney, and I asked why, he replied:
+
+“First, because he is Maltese, Mr. Pathurst; and next, because he talks
+Cockney like a native. And depend upon it, he heard Bow Bells before he
+lisped his first word.”
+
+“And has O’Sullivan bought Andy Fay’s sea-boots yet?” I queried.
+
+It was at this moment that Miss West emerged upon the poop. She was as
+rosy and vital as ever, and certainly, if she had been sea-sick, she
+flew no signals of it. As she came toward me, greeting me, I could not
+help remarking again the lithe and springy limb-movement with which she
+walked, and her fine, firm skin. Her neck, free in a sailor collar,
+with white sweater open at the throat, seemed almost redoubtably strong
+to my sleepless, jaundiced eyes. Her hair, under a white knitted cap,
+was smooth and well-groomed. In fact, the totality of impression she
+conveyed was of a well-groomedness one would not expect of a
+sea-captain’s daughter, much less of a woman who had been sea-sick.
+Life!—that is the key of her, the essential note of her—life and
+health. I’ll wager she has never entertained a morbid thought in that
+practical, balanced, sensible head of hers.
+
+“And how have you been?” she asked, then rattled on with sheer
+exuberance ere I could answer. “Had a lovely night’s sleep. I was
+really over my sickness yesterday, but I just devoted myself to resting
+up. I slept ten solid hours—what do you think of that?”
+
+“I wish I could say the same,” I replied with appropriate dejection, as
+I swung in beside her, for she had evinced her intention of
+promenading.
+
+“Oh, then you’ve been sick?”
+
+“On the contrary,” I answered dryly. “And I wish I had been. I haven’t
+had five hours’ sleep all told since I came on board. These pestiferous
+hives. . . ”
+
+I held up a lumpy wrist to show. She took one glance at it, halted
+abruptly, and, neatly balancing herself to the roll, took my wrist in
+both her hands and gave it close scrutiny.
+
+“Mercy!” she cried; and then began to laugh.
+
+I was of two minds. Her laughter was delightful to the ear, there was
+such a mellowness, and healthiness, and frankness about it. On the
+other hand, that it should be directed at my misfortune was
+exasperating. I suppose my perplexity showed in my face, for when she
+had eased her laughter and looked at me with a sobering countenance,
+she immediately went off into more peals.
+
+“You poor child,” she gurgled at last. “And when I think of all the
+cream of tartar I made you consume!”
+
+It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to
+take advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain
+just how many years she was my junior. She had told me she was twelve
+years old the time the _Dixie_ collided with the river steamer in San
+Francisco Bay. Very well, all I had to do was to ascertain the date of
+that disaster and I had her. But in the meantime she laughed at me and
+my hives.
+
+“I suppose it is—er—humorous, in some sort of way,” I said a bit
+stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss
+West, for it only set her off into more laughter.
+
+“What you needed,” she announced, with fresh gurglings, “was an
+exterior treatment.”
+
+“Don’t tell me I’ve got the chicken-pox or the measles,” I protested.
+
+“No.” She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another
+paroxysm. “What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . ”
+
+She paused deliberately, and looked me straight in the eyes.
+
+“Of bedbugs,” she concluded. And then, all seriousness and
+practicality, she went on: “But we’ll have that righted in a jiffy.
+I’ll turn the _Elsinore’s_ after-quarters upside down, though I know
+there are none in father’s room or mine. And though this is my first
+voyage with Mr. Pike I know he’s too hard-bitten” (here I laughed at
+her involuntary pun) “an old sailor not to know that his room is clean.
+Yours” (I was perturbed for fear she was going to say that I had
+brought them on board) “have most probably drifted in from for’ard.
+They always have them for’ard.
+
+“And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case. You’d
+better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you. The next couple
+of nights you’ll spend in the cabin or chart-room. And be sure Wada
+removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from your rooms.
+There’s going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing out of
+woodwork, and rebuilding. Trust me. I know the vermin.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+Such a cleaning up and turning over! For two nights, one in the
+chart-room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep,
+and I am now almost stupid with excess of sleep. The land seems very
+far away. By some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or
+months, have passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March
+morning. And yet it was March 28, and this is only the first week in
+April.
+
+I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West. She is the
+most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered. What
+passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she
+was convinced that he was not the erring one. In some strange way, my
+two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of
+vermin. Under Miss West’s instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all
+superficial woodwork have been ripped out. She worked the carpenter
+from daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of
+the sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches
+on the cleansing operations. The carpenter is now busy rebuilding my
+rooms. Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days I
+expect to be settled back in my quarters.
+
+Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been
+four. Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to
+the work. The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name,
+is an interesting fellow. I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West
+sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.
+
+This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea. How he
+happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not
+explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
+_Elsinore_. But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
+the sea. He is a small man, but most powerfully built. His shoulders
+are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and yet he is
+slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked. This last, however,
+is not due to sickness or ill-health. Tyro as he is on the sea, Steve
+Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked. He has a way of
+looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet
+it is at such moments I get most strongly the impression of
+crookedness. But he is a man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned
+with. In ways he suggests a kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so
+instant a prejudice against—Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.
+And I have already noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this
+trio that Steve Roberts chums.
+
+The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work
+for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature
+of the spine. But before she sent him packing other things occurred in
+which I was concerned. I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first
+came in to go to work, and I could not help observing the startled,
+avid glance he threw at my big shelves of books. He advanced on them in
+the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard of gold, and as a
+miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these book-titles
+with his eyes.
+
+And such eyes! All the bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the
+man possessed was there in his eyes. They were small, pale-blue, and
+gimlet-pointed with fire. His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to
+ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils. The man
+was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in learning that he
+hated all things except books.
+
+“Would you care to read some of them?” I said hospitably.
+
+All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head
+to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
+
+“It’s hell, ain’t it?—you with a strong body and servants to carry for
+you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts
+the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?”
+
+How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he
+uttered these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the
+hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety.
+Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were
+locked in a cage with a tiger-cat. The devilishness, the wickedness,
+and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me
+and addressed me, were most unpleasant. I swear I knew fear—not
+calculated caution, not timid apprehension, but blind, panic,
+unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the creature was blood curdling;
+nor did it require words to convey it: it poured from him, out of his
+red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered, twisted, tortured face,
+out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of hands. And yet, in that
+very moment of instinctive startle and repulsion, the thought was in my
+mind that with one hand I could take the throat of the weazened wisp of
+a crippled thing and throttle the malformed life out of it.
+
+But there was little encouragement in such thought—no more than a man
+might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush
+them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their
+poison into him. And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of him was
+the fear of being infected with his venom. I could not help it; for I
+caught a quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his
+mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid,
+destroying me.
+
+One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely, he
+did not know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads
+underfoot in nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a
+nightmare.
+
+“You suffer pain often?” I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by
+the calculated use of sympathy.
+
+“The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an’
+burn,” was his reply. “But by what damnable right do you have all these
+books, and time to read ’em, an’ all night in to read ’em, an’ soak in
+them, when me brain’s on fire, and I’m watch and watch, an’ me broken
+spine won’t let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?”
+
+Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
+modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what
+were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the
+writers he preferred. His library, he told me, among other things
+included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a complete
+Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full hall dozen
+he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood
+Reade’s _Martyrdom of Man_, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of
+Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime favourite.
+
+He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently
+mad from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him about
+books and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He liked O.
+Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four—flusher. Edgar Saltus’
+_Anatomy of Negation_ was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a
+mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ was the stuff,
+though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He
+preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but
+Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. John Masefield knew what he
+was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was living too fat to turn out the
+stuff he first turned out.
+
+And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had
+ever heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology.
+Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist. On
+the other hand, political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism
+and quietism. Political socialism had gone to pot, while industrial
+unionism was the logical culmination of Marxism. He was a direct
+actionist. The mass strike was the thing. Sabotage, not merely as a
+withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen destruction-of-profits policy,
+was the weapon. Of course he believed in the propaganda of the deed,
+but a man was a fool to talk about it. His job was to do it and keep
+his mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence. Of
+course, _he_ talked; but what of it? Didn’t he have curvature of the
+spine? He didn’t care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried to
+give it to him.
+
+And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he talked
+about and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was
+patent that he was self-educated. When I asked him how it was he had
+come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as hot one
+place as another. He unbent enough to tell me that he had been an
+athlete, when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer in Eastern
+Canada. And then his disease had come upon him, and for a quarter of a
+century he had been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of a
+personal acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any
+man that ever existed.
+
+It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
+doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour
+look of disapprobation. Mr. Pike’s countenance is almost petrified. Any
+expression seems to crack it—with the exception of sourness. But when
+Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His
+hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he
+condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs’s time. To Mulligan Jacobs he
+said in his customary snarl:
+
+“Go on an’ get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch below.”
+
+And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I had
+already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was
+manifested. I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather,
+did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.
+
+“Aw, go to hell, you old stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+If ever I had seen murder in a man’s eyes, I saw it then in the mate’s.
+He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open
+but clenched. One stroke of that bear’s paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all
+the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
+darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake
+on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate
+giant. More than that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted
+neck to meet the blow.
+
+It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that
+frail, crippled, repulsive thing.
+
+“It’s me that can call you the stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs. “I ain’t
+no Larry. G’wan an’ hit me. Why don’t you hit me?”
+
+And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose whole
+career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, could
+not strike this fractured splinter of a man. I swear that Mr. Pike
+actually struggled with himself to strike. I saw it. But he could not.
+
+“Go on to your work,” he ordered. “The voyage is young yet, Mulligan.
+I’ll have you eatin’ outa my hand before it’s over.”
+
+And Mulligan Jacobs’s face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
+neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
+into incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that
+consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it. All he could do
+was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should not have
+been surprised had he spat poison in the mate’s face.
+
+And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
+beaten.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+I can’t get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the cripple
+facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is different
+from the books and from what I know of existence. It is revelation.
+Life is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter flame that
+informs Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he—with no hope of any profit, not a
+hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to God, but a mere
+filthy, malignant rat—how dare he, I ask myself, be so defiant, so
+death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt all the schools of
+the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg to stand
+on that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil
+of philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan
+Jacobs . . . unless he be insane. And then I don’t know.
+
+Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans
+with whom I am herded on the _Elsinore_?
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is
+another one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon. He
+is the pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the
+men were routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass—the man I so
+instantly adjudged a drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.
+
+I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.
+
+“White slaver,” was his answer. “Had to skin outa New York to save his
+skin. He’ll be consorting with those other three larrakins I gave a
+piece of my mind to.”
+
+“And what do you make of them?” I asked.
+
+“A month’s wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
+committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin’ for
+’em right now. I’d like to have the cash somebody’s put up in New York
+to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed.”
+
+“Gangsters?” I queried.
+
+“That’s what. But I’ll trim their dirty hides. I’ll trim ’em. Mr.
+Pathurst, this voyage ain’t started yet, and this old stiff’s a long
+way from his last legs. I’ll give them a run for their money. Why, I’ve
+buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And I’ll
+bury some of them that think me an old stiff.”
+
+He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
+
+“Mr. Pathurst, I’ve heard you’re a writing man. And when they told me
+at the agents’ you were going along passenger, I made a point of going
+to see your play. Now I’m not saying anything about that play, one way
+or the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you’ll
+get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell’s going to pop,
+believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that’ll do a lot of
+the poppin’. Some several and plenty’s going to learn who’s an old
+stiff.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is
+delicious—thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
+Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then there
+was Wada. But no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate the
+problem of woman. It is just such an incident among a million others
+that keeps the thinker’s gaze fixed on woman. They truly are the
+mothers and the conservers of the race.
+
+Rail as I will at Miss West’s red-blood complacency of life, yet I must
+bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible, hard-headed,
+a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing
+attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must
+confess I am most grateful that she is along. Had she not been on the
+_Elsinore_, by this time I should have been so overwrought from lack of
+sleep that I would be biting my veins and howling—as mad a hatter as
+any of our cargo of mad hatters. And so we come to it—the everlasting
+mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it
+patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her. But,
+regarding Miss West, I do entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she
+is not a suffragette. That would be too much.
+
+Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a
+bit fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he
+regretted the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms. It seems
+he has a keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on the
+_Elsinore_, and that, although he is oblivious of the existence of the
+crew, he is not oblivious of my comfort. By his few expressions of
+regret it appears that he cannot forgive himself for his careless
+acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my affliction. Yes; Captain
+West is a real human man. Is he not the father of the slender-faced,
+strapping-bodied Miss West?
+
+“Thank goodness that’s settled,” was Miss West’s exclamation this
+morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how
+gloriously I had slept.
+
+And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all
+practical purposes—it was settled, she next said:
+
+“Come on and see the chickens.”
+
+And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the
+’midship-house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat hens
+in the ship’s chicken-coop.
+
+As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait
+of hers as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming
+down on the tug from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor
+require to be entertained.
+
+_Come and see the chickens_!—Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of
+that simple invitation! For effrontery of possessiveness is there
+anything that can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female,
+human woman?—_Come and see the chickens_! Oh, well, the sailors for’ard
+may be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here, aft, is one
+male passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an equally
+hard-bitten adventurer on the sea of matrimony. When I go over the
+census I remember at least several women, superior to Miss West, who
+trilled their song of sex and failed to shipwreck me.
+
+As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of the
+sea has stolen into my mental processes. Involuntarily I think in terms
+of the sea. Another thing I notice is my excessive use of superlatives.
+But then, everything on board the _Elsinore_ is superlative. I find
+myself continually combing my vocabulary in quest of just and adequate
+words. Yet am I aware of failure. For example, all the words of all the
+dictionaries would fail to approximate the exceeding terribleness of
+Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+But to return to the chickens. Despite every precaution, it was evident
+that they had had a hard time during the past days of storm. It was
+equally evident that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness, had not
+neglected them. Under her directions the steward had actually installed
+a small oil-stove in the big coop, and she now beckoned him up to the
+top of the house as he was passing for’ard to the galley. It was for
+the purpose of instructing him further in the matter of feeding them.
+
+Where were the grits? They needed grits. He didn’t know. The sack had
+been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had promised a
+couple of sailors that afternoon to overhaul the lazarette.
+
+“Plenty of ashes,” she told the steward. “Remember. And if a sailor
+doesn’t clean the coop each day, you report to me. And give them only
+clean food—no spoiled scraps, mind. How many eggs yesterday?”
+
+The steward’s eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got nine
+the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.
+
+“The poor things,” said Miss West—to me. “You’ve no idea how bad
+weather reduces their laying.” She turned back upon the steward. “Mind
+now, you watch and find out which hens don’t lay, and kill them first.
+And you ask me each time before you kill one.”
+
+I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while
+Miss West talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler. But it gave me
+opportunity to observe her. It is the length of her eyes that
+accentuates their steadiness of gaze—helped, of course, by the dark
+brows and lashes. I noted again the warm gray of her eyes. And I began
+to identify her, to locate her. She is a physical type of the best of
+the womanhood of old New England. Nothing spare nor meagre, nor bred
+out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one would call
+robust. When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred. I must fall back
+on my other word, which will have to be the last: Miss West is
+vital-bodied. That is the key-word.
+
+When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I ventured
+my customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:
+
+“And has O’Sullivan bought Andy Fay’s sea-boots yet?”
+
+“Not yet, Mr. Pathurst,” was the reply, “though he nearly got them
+early this morning. Come on along, sir, and I’ll show you.”
+
+Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along
+the bridge, across the ’midship-house and the for’ard-house. From the
+edge of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two
+Japanese, with sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed
+bundle that unmistakably contained a human body.
+
+“O’Sullivan used a razor,” said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+“And that is Andy Fay?” I cried.
+
+“No, sir, not Andy. That’s a Dutchman. Christian Jespersen was his name
+on the articles. He got in O’Sullivan’s way when O’Sullivan went after
+the boots. That’s what saved Andy. Andy was more active. Jespersen
+couldn’t get out of his own way, much less out of O’Sullivan’s. There’s
+Andy sitting over there.”
+
+I followed Mr. Mellaire’s gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
+Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe. One arm was in a
+sling and his head was bandaged. Beside him squatted Mulligan Jacobs.
+They were a pair. Both were blue-eyed, and both were malevolent-eyed.
+And they were equally emaciated. It was easy to see that they had
+discovered early in the voyage their kinship of bitterness. Andy Fay, I
+knew, was sixty-three years old, although he looked a hundred; and
+Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty, made up for the difference
+by the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in his face and eyes. I
+wondered if he sat beside the injured bitter one in some sense of
+sympathy, or if he were there in order to gloat.
+
+Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
+inevitable clown-grin. One hand was swathed in bandages.
+
+“Must have kept Mr. Pike busy,” was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.
+
+“He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till eight.”
+
+“What?” I asked. “Are there any more?”
+
+“One more, sir, a sheeny. I didn’t know his name before, but Mr. Pike
+got it—Isaac B. Chantz. I never saw in all my life at sea as many
+sheenies as are on board the _Elsinore_ right now. Sheenies don’t take
+to the sea as a rule. We’ve certainly got more than our share of them.
+Chantz isn’t badly hurt, but you ought to hear him whimper.”
+
+“Where’s O’Sullivan?” I inquired.
+
+“In the ’midship-house with Davis, and without a mark. Mr. Pike got
+into the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw. And now he’s
+lashed down and talking in a trance. He’s thrown the fear of God into
+Davis. Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike, threatening
+to brain O’Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and complaining that
+it’s no way to run a hospital. He’d have padded cells, straitjackets,
+night and day nurses, and violent wards, I suppose—and a convalescents’
+home in a Queen Anne cottage on the poop.
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr. Mellaire sighed. “This is the funniest voyage
+and the funniest crew I’ve ever tackled. It’s not going to come to a
+good end. Anybody can see that with half an eye. It’ll be dead of
+winter off the Horn, and a fo’c’s’le full of lunatics and cripples to
+do the work.—Just take a look at that one. Crazy as a bedbug. He’s
+likely to go overboard any time.”
+
+I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung
+overboard the first day. He had just come around the corner of the
+house, and, beyond one arm in a sling, seemed in good condition. He
+walked easily and with strength, a testimonial to the virtues of Mr.
+Pike’s rough surgery.
+
+My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian
+Jespersen, and to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor’s
+shroud. One of them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton and
+bandage.
+
+“Did he get hurt, too?” I asked.
+
+“No, sir. He’s the sail-maker. They’re both sail-makers. He’s a good
+one, too. Yatsuda is his name. But he’s just had blood-poisoning and
+lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months. He flatly refused to
+let them amputate. He’s all right now, but the hand is dead, all except
+the thumb and fore-finger, and he’s teaching himself to sew with his
+left hand. He’s as clever a sail-maker as you’ll find at sea.”
+
+“A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination,” I remarked.
+
+“It’s put five men out of commission,” Mr. Mellaire sighed. “There’s
+O’Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone, and Andy Fay, and
+Shorty, and the sheeny. And the voyage not started yet. And there’s
+Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps—why, sir, we’ll
+soon be that weak it’ll take both watches to set a staysail.”
+
+Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr. Mellaire,
+I was shocked—no; not because death was aboard with us. I have stood by
+my philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or by murder. What
+affected me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the affair. Even
+murder—murder for cause—I can understand. It is comprehensible that men
+should kill one another in the passion of love, of hatred, of
+patriotism, of religion. But this was different. Here was killing
+without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing monstrously
+irrational.
+
+Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the open
+door of the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O’Sullivan, and
+peeped in. There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower bunk,
+rolling his eyes and raving. In the top bunk, directly above, lay
+Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe. I looked for the marlin-spike.
+There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him.
+
+“It’s hell, ain’t it, sir?” was his greeting. “And how am I goin’ to
+get any sleep with that baboon chattering away there. He never lets
+up—keeps his chin-music goin’ right along when he’s asleep, only worse.
+The way he grits his teeth is something awful. Now I leave it to you,
+sir, is it right to put a crazy like that in with a sick man? And I am
+a sick man.”
+
+While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and
+halted just out of sight of the man in the bunk. And the man talked on.
+
+“By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk. It hurts me to crawl up
+here. It’s inhumanity, that’s what it is, and sailors at sea are better
+protected by the law than they used to be. And I’ll have you for a
+witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle.”
+
+Mr. Pike stepped into the doorway.
+
+“Shut up, you damned sea-lawyer, you,” he snarled. “Haven’t you played
+a dirty trick enough comin’ on board this ship in your condition? And
+if I have anything more out of you . . . ”
+
+Mr. Pike was so angry that he could not complete the threat. After
+spluttering for a moment he made a fresh attempt.
+
+“You . . . you . . . well, you annoy me, that’s what you do.”
+
+“I know the law, sir,” Davis answered promptly. “I worked full able
+seaman on this here ship. All hands can testify to that. I was aloft
+from the start. Yes, sir, and up to my neck in salt water day and
+night. And you had me below trimmin’ coal. I did full duty and more,
+until this sickness got me—”
+
+“You were petrified and rotten before you ever saw this ship,” Mr. Pike
+broke in.
+
+“The court’ll decide that, sir,” replied the imperturbable Davis.
+
+“And if you go to shoutin’ off your sea-lawyer mouth,” Mr. Pike
+continued, “I’ll jerk you out of that and show you what real work is.”
+
+“An’ lay the owners open for lovely damages when we get in,” Davis
+sneered.
+
+“Not if I bury you before we get in,” was the mate’s quick, grim
+retort. “And let me tell you, Davis, you ain’t the first sea-lawyer
+I’ve dropped over the side with a sack of coal to his feet.”
+
+Mr. Pike turned, with a final “Damned sea-lawyer!” and started along
+the deck. I was walking behind him when he stopped abruptly.
+
+“Mr. Pathurst.”
+
+Not as an officer to a passenger did he thus address me. His tone was
+imperative, and I gave heed.
+
+“Mr. Pathurst. From now on the less you see aboard this ship the
+better. That is all.”
+
+And again he turned on his heel and went his way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+No, the sea is not a gentle place. It must be the very hardness of the
+life that makes all sea-people hard. Of course, Captain West is unaware
+that his crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never address the
+men save to give commands. But Miss West, who is more like myself, a
+passenger, ignores the men. She does not even say good-morning to the
+man at the wheel when she first comes on deck. Nevertheless I shall, at
+least to the man at the wheel. Am I not a passenger?
+
+Which reminds me. Technically I am not a passenger. The _Elsinore_ has
+no licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as third
+mate and am supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month. Wada is
+down as cabin boy, although I paid a good price for his passage and he
+is my servant.
+
+Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead. Within an hour
+after I had watched the sail-makers at work Christian Jespersen was
+slid overboard, feet first, a sack of coal to his feet to sink him. It
+was a mild, calm day, and the _Elsinore_, logging a lazy two knots, was
+not hove to for the occasion. At the last moment Captain West came
+for’ard, prayer-book in hand, read the brief service for burial at sea,
+and returned immediately aft. It was the first time I had seen him
+for’ard.
+
+I shall not bother to describe the burial. All I shall say of it is
+that it was as sordid as Christian Jespersen’s life had been and as his
+death had been.
+
+As for Miss West, she sat in a deck-chair on the poop busily engaged
+with some sort of fancy work. When Christian Jespersen and his coal
+splashed into the sea the crew immediately dispersed, the watch below
+going to its bunks, the watch on deck to its work. Not a minute elapsed
+ere Mr. Mellaire was giving orders and the men were pulling and
+hauling. So I returned to the poop to be unpleasantly impressed by Miss
+West’s smiling unconcern.
+
+“Well, he’s buried,” I observed.
+
+“Oh,” she said, with all the tonelessness of disinterest, and went on
+with her stitching.
+
+She must have sensed my frame of mind, for, after a moment, she paused
+from her sewing and looked at me.
+
+Your first sea funeral, Mr. Pathurst?
+
+“Death at sea does not seem to affect you,” I said bluntly.
+
+“Not any more than on the land.” She shrugged her shoulders. “So many
+people die, you know. And when they are strangers to you . . . well,
+what do you do on the land when you learn that some workers have been
+killed in a factory you pass every day coming to town? It is the same
+on the sea.”
+
+“It’s too bad we are a hand short,” I said deliberately.
+
+It did not miss her. Just as deliberately she replied:
+
+“Yes, isn’t it? And so early in the voyage, too.” She looked at me, and
+when I could not forbear a smile of appreciation she smiled back.
+
+“Oh, I know very well, Mr. Pathurst, that you think me a heartless
+wretch. But it isn’t that it’s . . . it’s the sea, I suppose. And yet,
+I didn’t know this man. I don’t remember ever having seen him. At this
+stage of the voyage I doubt if I could pick out half-a-dozen of the
+sailors as men I had ever laid eyes on. So why vex myself with even
+thinking of this stupid stranger who was killed by another stupid
+stranger? As well might one die of grief with reading the murder
+columns of the daily papers.”
+
+“And yet, it seems somehow different,” I contended.
+
+“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” she assured me cheerfully, and returned to
+her sewing.
+
+I asked her if she had read Moody’s _Ship of Souls_, but she had not. I
+searched her out further. She liked Browning, and was especially fond
+of _The Ring and the Book_. This was the key to her. She cared only for
+healthful literature—for the literature that exposits the vital lies of
+life.
+
+For instance, the mention of Schopenhauer produced smiles and laughter.
+To her all the philosophers of pessimism were laughable. The red blood
+of her would not permit her to take them seriously. I tried her out
+with a conversation I had had with De Casseres shortly before leaving
+New York. De Casseres, after tracing Jules de Gaultier’s philosophic
+genealogy back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had concluded with the
+proposition that out of their two formulas de Gaultier had constructed
+an even profounder formula. The “Will-to-Live” of the one and the
+“Will-to-Power” of the other were, after all, only parts of de
+Gaultier’s supreme generalization, the “Will-to-Illusion.”
+
+I flatter myself that even De Casseres would have been pleased with the
+way I repeated his argument. And when I had concluded it, Miss West
+promptly demanded if the realists might not be fooled by their own
+phrases as often and as completely as were the poor common mortals with
+the vital lies they never questioned.
+
+And there we were. An ordinary young woman, who had never vexed her
+brains with ultimate problems, hears such things stated for the first
+time, and immediately, and with a laugh, sweeps them all away. I doubt
+not that De Casseres would have agreed with her.
+
+“Do you believe in God?” I asked rather abruptly. She dropped her
+sewing into her lap, looked at me meditatively, then gazed on and away
+across the flashing sea and up into the azure dome of sky. And finally,
+with true feminine evasion, she replied:
+
+“My father does.”
+
+“But you?” I insisted.
+
+“I really don’t know. I don’t bother my head about such things. I used
+to when I was a little girl. And yet . . . yes, surely I believe in
+God. At times, when I am not thinking about it at all, I am very sure,
+and my faith that all is well is just as strong as the faith of your
+Jewish friend in the phrases of the philosophers. That’s all it comes
+to, I suppose, in every case—faith. But, as I say, why bother?”
+
+“Ah, I have you now, Miss West!” I cried. “You are a true daughter of
+Herodias.”
+
+“It doesn’t sound nice,” she said with a _moue_.
+
+“And it isn’t,” I exulted. “Nevertheless, it is what you are. It is
+Arthur Symon’s poem, _The Daughters of Herodias_. Some day I shall read
+it to you, and you will answer. I know you will answer that you, too,
+have looked often upon the stars.”
+
+We had just got upon the subject of music, of which she possesses a
+surprisingly solid knowledge, and she was telling me that Debussy and
+his school held no particular charm for her, when Possum set up a wild
+yelping.
+
+The puppy had strayed for’ard along the bridge to the ’midship-house,
+and had evidently been investigating the chickens when his disaster
+came upon him. So shrill was his terror that we both stood up. He was
+dashing along the bridge toward us at full speed, yelping at every jump
+and continually turning his head back in the direction whence he came.
+
+I spoke to him and held out my hand, and was rewarded with a snap and
+clash of teeth as he scuttled past. Still with head turned back, he
+went on along the poop. Before I could apprehend his danger, Mr. Pike
+and Miss West were after him. The mate was the nearer, and with a
+magnificent leap gained the rail just in time to intercept Possum, who
+was blindly going overboard under the slender railing. With a sort of
+scooping kick Mr. Pike sent the animal rolling half across the poop.
+Howling and snapping more violently, Possum regained his feet and
+staggered on toward the opposite railing.
+
+“Don’t touch him!” Mr. Pike cried, as Miss West showed her intention of
+catching the crazed little animal with her hands. “Don’t touch’m! He’s
+got a fit.”
+
+But it did not deter her. He was half-way under the railing when she
+caught him up and held him at arm’s length while he howled and barked
+and slavered.
+
+“It’s a fit,” said Mr. Pike, as the terrier collapsed and lay on the
+deck jerking convulsively.
+
+“Perhaps a chicken pecked him,” said Miss West. “At any rate, get a
+bucket of water.”
+
+“Better let me take him,” I volunteered helplessly, for I was
+unfamiliar with fits.
+
+“No; it’s all right,” she answered. “I’ll take charge of him. The cold
+water is what he needs. He got too close to the coop, and a peck on the
+nose frightened him into the fit.”
+
+“First time I ever heard of a fit coming that way,” Mr. Pike remarked,
+as he poured water over the puppy under Miss West’s direction. “It’s
+just a plain puppy fit. They all get them at sea.”
+
+“I think it was the sails that caused it,” I argued. “I’ve noticed that
+he is very afraid of them. When they flap, he crouches down in terror
+and starts to run. You noticed how he ran with his head turned back?”
+
+“I’ve seen dogs with fits do that when there was nothing to frighten
+them,” Mr. Pike contended.
+
+“It was a fit, no matter what caused it,” Miss West stated
+conclusively. “Which means that he has not been fed properly. From now
+on I shall feed him. You tell your boy that, Mr. Pathurst. Nobody is to
+feed Possum anything without my permission.”
+
+At this juncture Wada arrived with Possum’s little sleeping box, and
+they prepared to take him below.
+
+“It was splendid of you, Miss West,” I said, “and rash, as well, and I
+won’t attempt to thank you. But I tell you what-you take him. He’s your
+dog now.”
+
+She laughed and shook her head as I opened the chart-house door for her
+to pass.
+
+“No; but I’ll take care of him for you. Now don’t bother to come below.
+This is my affair, and you would only be in the way. Wada will help
+me.”
+
+And I was rather surprised, as I returned to my deck chair and sat
+down, to find how affected I was by the little episode. I remembered,
+at the first, that my pulse had been distinctly accelerated with the
+excitement of what had taken place. And somehow, as I leaned back in my
+chair and lighted a cigarette, the strangeness of the whole voyage
+vividly came to me. Miss West and I talk philosophy and art on the poop
+of a stately ship in a circle of flashing sea, while Captain West
+dreams of his far home, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire stand watch and
+watch and snarl orders, and the slaves of men pull and haul, and Possum
+has fits, and Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs burn with hatred
+unconsumable, and the small-handed half-caste Chinese cooks for all,
+and Sundry Buyers perpetually presses his abdomen, and O’Sullivan raves
+in the steel cell of the ’midship-house, and Charles Davis lies about
+him nursing a marlin-spike, and Christian Jespersen, miles astern, is
+deep sunk in the sea with a sack of coal at his feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+Two weeks out to-day, on a balmy sea, under a cloud-flecked sky, and
+slipping an easy eight knots through the water to a light easterly
+wind. Captain West said he was almost convinced that it was the
+north-east trade. Also, I have learned that the _Elsinore_, in order to
+avoid being jammed down on Cape San Roque, on the Brazil coast, must
+first fight eastward almost to the coast of Africa. On occasion, on
+this traverse, the Cape Verde Islands are raised. No wonder the voyage
+from Baltimore to Seattle is reckoned at eighteen thousand miles.
+
+I found Tony, the suicidal Greek, steering this morning when I came on
+deck. He seemed sensible enough, and quite rationally took off his hat
+when I said good morning to him. The sick men are improving nicely,
+with the exceptions of Charles Davis and O’Sullivan. The latter still
+is lashed to his bunk, and Mr. Pike has compelled Davis to attend on
+him. As a result, Davis moves about the deck, bringing food and water
+from the galley and grumbling his wrongs to every member of the crew.
+
+Wada told me a strange thing this morning. It seems that he, the
+steward, and the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the cook’s
+room—all being Asiatics—where they talk over ship’s gossip. They seem
+to miss little, and Wada brings it all to me. The thing Wada told me
+was the curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire. They have sat in judgment on
+him and they do not approve of his intimacy with the three gangsters
+for’ard.
+
+“But, Wada,” I said, “he is not that kind of a man. He is very hard and
+rough with all the sailors. He treats them like dogs. You know that.”
+
+“Sure,” assented Wada. “Other sailors he do that. But those three very
+bad men he make good friends. Louis say second mate belong aft like
+first mate and captain. No good for second mate talk like friend with
+sailors. No good for ship. Bime by trouble. You see. Louis say Mr.
+Mellaire crazy do that kind funny business.”
+
+All of which, if it were true, and I saw no reason to doubt it, led me
+to inquire. It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and
+Bert Rhine, have made themselves cocks of the forecastle. Standing
+together, they have established a reign of terror and are ruling the
+forecastle. All their training in New York in ruling the slum brutes
+and weaklings in their gangs fits them for the part. As near as I could
+make out from Wada’s tale, they first began on the two Italians in
+their watch, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. By means I cannot guess,
+they have reduced these two wretches to trembling slaves. As an
+instance, the other night, according to the ship’s gossip, Bert Rhine
+made Bombini get out of bed and fetch him a drink of water.
+
+Isaac Chantz is likewise under their rule, though he is treated more
+kindly. Herman Lunkenheimer, a good-natured but simple-minded dolt of a
+German, received a severe beating from the three because he refused to
+wash some of Nosey Murphy’s dirty garments. The two bosuns are in fear
+of their lives with this clique, which is growing; for Steve Roberts,
+the ex-cowboy, and the white-slaver, Arthur Deacon, have been admitted
+to it.
+
+I am the only one aft who possesses this information, and I confess I
+don’t know what to do with it. I know that Mr. Pike would tell me to
+mind my own business. Mr. Mellaire is out of the question. And Captain
+West hasn’t any crew. And I fear Miss West would laugh at me for my
+pains. Besides, I understand that every forecastle has its bully, or
+group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern
+of the afterguard. The ship’s work goes on. The only effect I can
+conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow
+to this petty tyranny for’ard.
+
+—Oh, and another thing Wada told me. The gangster clique has
+established its privilege of taking first cut of the salt-beef in the
+meat-kids. After that, the rest take the rejected pieces. But I will
+say, contrary to my expectations, the _Elsinore’s_ forecastle is well
+found. The men are not on whack. They have all they want to eat. A
+barrel of good hardtack stands always open in the forecastle. Louis
+bakes fresh bread for the sailors three times a week. The variety of
+food is excellent, if not the quality. There is no restriction in the
+amount of water for drinking purposes. And I can only say that in this
+good weather the men’s appearance improves daily.
+
+Possum is very sick. Each day he grows thinner. Scarcely can I call him
+a perambulating skeleton, because he is too weak to walk. Each day, in
+this delightful weather, Wada, under Miss West’s instructions, brings
+him up in his box and places him out of the wind on the awninged poop.
+She has taken full charge of the puppy, and has him sleep in her room
+each night. I found her yesterday, in the chart-room, reading up the
+_Elsinore’s_ medical library. Later on she overhauled the
+medicine-chest. She is essentially the life-giving, life-conserving
+female of the species. All her ways, for herself and for others, make
+toward life.
+
+And yet—and this is so curious it gives me pause—she shows no interest
+in the sick and injured for’ard.
+
+They are to her cattle, or less than cattle. As the life-giver and
+race-conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping
+regularly into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the
+midship-house and dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts. On the
+contrary, as with her father, these wretched humans do not exist.
+
+And still again, when the steward jammed a splinter under his nail, she
+was greatly concerned, and manipulated the tweezers and pulled it out.
+The Elsinore reminds me of a slave plantation before the war; and Miss
+West is the lady of the plantation, interested only in the
+house-slaves. The field slaves are beyond her ken or consideration, and
+the sailors are the Elsinore’s field slaves. Why, several days back,
+when Wada suffered from a severe headache, she was quite perturbed, and
+dosed him with aspirin. Well, I suppose this is all due to her
+sea-training. She has been trained hard.
+
+We have the phonograph in the second dog-watch every other evening in
+this fine weather. On the alternate evenings this period is Mr. Pike’s
+watch on deck. But when it is his evening below, even at dinner, he
+betrays his anticipation by an eagerness ill suppressed. And yet, on
+each such occasion, he punctiliously waits until we ask if we are to be
+favoured with music. Then his hard-bitten face lights up, although the
+lines remain hard as ever, hiding his ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly,
+off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over a few records. And so,
+every other evening, we watch this killer and driver, with lacerated
+knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved discs,
+ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the
+voyage, at such moments believing in God.
+
+A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore. I confess, while it
+seems that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with
+every detail of the little round of living, that I cannot orient
+myself. My mind continually strays from things non-understandable to
+things incomprehensible—from our Samurai captain with the exquisite
+Gabriel voice that is heard only in the tumult and thunder of storm; on
+to the ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with the bright, liquid,
+pain-filled eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the forecastle and
+seduce the second mate; to the perpetually muttering O’Sullivan in the
+steel-walled hole and the complaining Davis nursing the marlin-spike in
+the upper bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift in this
+vastitude of ocean with a coal-sack at his feet. At such moments all
+the life on the _Elsinore_ becomes as unreal as life to the philosopher
+is unreal.
+
+I am a philosopher. Therefore, it is unreal to me. But is it unreal to
+Messrs. Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the rest of
+the stupid herd for’ard? I cannot help remembering a remark of De
+Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin’s. Said he: “The profoundest
+instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real.
+He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion.
+Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and
+myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the
+privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake,
+has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination.
+Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief,
+Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From
+Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.”
+
+Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes
+to me, that to all these slaves of the _Elsinore_ the Real is real
+because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with
+the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because
+I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional
+escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely
+to the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist
+on board the _Elsinore_. Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the
+whole phenomena of living on the _Elsinore_ see it only as
+phantasmagoria.
+
+Paradoxes? I admit it. All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
+contradictions. But all the others on the _Elsinore_, sheer surface
+swimmers, keep afloat on this sea—forsooth, because they have never
+dreamed its depth. And I can easily imagine what Miss West’s practical,
+hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine. After all,
+words are traps. I don’t know what I know, nor what I think I think.
+
+This I do know: I cannot orient myself. I am the maddest and most
+sea-lost soul on board. Take Miss West. I am beginning to admire her.
+Why, I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably healthy. And
+yet, it is this very health of her, the absence of any shred of
+degenerative genius, that prevents her from being great . . . for
+instance, in her music.
+
+A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her
+playing. The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the
+best. To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr,
+and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago. And yet
+she lacks in her music.
+
+Her touch is masterful. She has the firmness and weight (without
+sharpness or pounding) of a man’s playing—the strength and surety that
+most women lack and that some women know they lack. When she makes a
+slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is
+overcome. And she is quick to overcome it.
+
+Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no
+sentiment, no fire. When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness
+and neatness. She is the master of Chopin’s technique, but she never
+walks where Chopin walks on the heights. Somehow, she stops short of
+the fulness of music.
+
+I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my
+suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies. On the Third
+Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was.
+
+“You were talking of Debussy,” she remarked. “I’ve got some of his
+stuff here. But I don’t get into it. I don’t understand it, and there
+is no use in trying. It doesn’t seem altogether like real music to me.
+It fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold of it.”
+
+“Yet you like MacDowell,” I challenged.
+
+“Y. . . es,” she admitted grudgingly. “His New England Idylls and
+Fireside Tales. And I like that Finnish man’s stuff, Sibelius, too,
+although it seems to me too soft, too richly soft, too beautiful, if
+you know what I mean. It seems to cloy.”
+
+What a pity, I thought, that with that noble masculine touch of hers
+she is unaware of the deeps of music. Some day I shall try to get from
+her just what Beethoven, say, and Chopin, mean to her. She has not read
+Shaw’s _Perfect Wagnerite_, nor had she ever heard of Nietzsche’s _Case
+of Wagner_. She likes Mozart, and old Boccherini, and Leonardo Leo.
+Likewise she is partial to Schumann, especially Forest Scenes. And she
+played his Papillons most brilliantly. When I closed my eyes I could
+have sworn it was a man’s fingers on the keys.
+
+And yet, I must say it, in the long run her playing makes me nervous. I
+am continually led up to false expectations. Always, she seems just on
+the verge of achieving the big thing, the super-big thing, and always
+she just misses it by a shade. Just as I am prepared for the
+culminating flash and illumination, I receive more perfection of
+technique. She is cold. She must be cold . . . Or else, and the theory
+is worth considering, she is too healthy.
+
+I shall certainly read to her _The Daughters of Herodias_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+Was there ever such a voyage! This morning, when I came on deck, I
+found nobody at the wheel. It was a startling sight—the great
+_Elsinore_, by the wind, under an Alpine range of canvas, every sail
+set from skysails to try-sails and spanker, slipping across the surface
+of a mild trade-wind sea, and no hand at the wheel to guide her.
+
+No one was on the poop. It was Mr. Pike’s watch, and I strolled for’ard
+along the bridge to find him. He was on Number One hatch giving some
+instructions to the sail-makers. I awaited my chance, until he glanced
+up and greeted me.
+
+“Good morning,” I answered. “And what man is at the wheel now?”
+
+“That crazy Greek, Tony,” he replied.
+
+“A month’s wages to a pound of tobacco he isn’t,” I offered.
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me with quick sharpness.
+
+“Who is at the wheel?”
+
+“Nobody,” I replied.
+
+And then he exploded into action. The age-lag left his massive frame,
+and he bounded aft along the deck at a speed no man on board could have
+exceeded; and I doubt if very many could have equalled it. He went up
+the poop-ladder three steps at a time and disappeared in the direction
+of the wheel behind the chart-house.
+
+Next came a promptitude of bellowed orders, and all the watch was
+slacking away after braces to starboard and pulling on after braces to
+port. I had already learned the manoeuvre. Mr. Pike was wearing ship.
+
+As I returned aft along the bridge Mr. Mellaire and the carpenter
+emerged from the cabin door. They had been interrupted at breakfast,
+for they were wiping their mouths. Mr. Pike came to the break of the
+poop, called down instructions to the second mate, who proceeded
+for’ard, and ordered the carpenter to take the wheel.
+
+As the _Elsinore_ swung around on her heel Mr. Pike put her on the back
+track so as to cover the water she had just crossed over. He lowered
+the glasses through which he was scanning the sea and pointed down the
+hatchway that opened into the big after-room beneath. The ladder was
+gone.
+
+“Must have taken the lazarette ladder with him,” said Mr. Pike.
+
+Captain West strolled out of the chart-room. He said good morning in
+his customary way, courteously to me and formally to the mate, and
+strolled on along the poop to the wheel, where he paused to glance into
+the binnacle. Turning, he went on leisurely to the break of the poop.
+Again he came back to us. Fully two minutes must have elapsed ere he
+spoke.
+
+“What is the matter, Mr. Pike? Man overboard?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” was the answer.
+
+“And took the lazarette ladder along with him?” Captain West queried.
+
+“Yes, sir. It’s the Greek that jumped over at Baltimore.”
+
+Evidently the affair was not serious enough for Captain West to be the
+Samurai. He lighted a cigar and resumed his stroll. And yet he had
+missed nothing, not even the absence of the ladder.
+
+Mr. Pike sent look-outs aloft to every skysail-yard, and the _Elsinore_
+slipped along through the smooth sea. Miss West came up and stood
+beside me, searching the ocean with her eyes while I told her the
+little I knew. She evidenced no excitement, and reassured me by telling
+me how difficult it was to lose a man of Tony’s suicidal type.
+
+“Their madness always seems to come upon them in fine weather or under
+safe circumstances,” she smiled, “when a boat can be lowered or a tug
+is alongside. And sometimes they take life—preservers with them, as in
+this case.”
+
+At the end of an hour Mr. Pike wore the _Elsinore_ around, and again
+retraced the course she must have been sailing when the Greek went
+over. Captain West still strolled and smoked, and Miss West made a
+brief trip below to give Wada forgotten instructions about Possum. Andy
+Pay was called to the wheel, and the carpenter went below to finish his
+breakfast.
+
+It all seemed rather callous to me. Nobody was much concerned for the
+man who was overboard somewhere on that lonely ocean. And yet I had to
+admit that everything possible was being done to find him. I talked a
+little with Mr. Pike, and he seemed more vexed than anything else. He
+disliked to have the ship’s work interrupted in such fashion.
+
+Mr. Mellaire’s attitude was different.
+
+“We are short-handed enough as it is,” he told me, when he joined us on
+the poop. “We can’t afford to lose him even if he is crazy. We need
+him. He’s a good sailor most of the time.”
+
+The hail came from the mizzen-skysail-yard. The Maltese Cockney it was
+who first sighted the man and called down the information. The mate,
+looking to windwards, suddenly lowered his glasses, rubbed his eyes in
+a puzzled way, and looked again. Then Miss West, using another pair of
+glasses, cried out in surprise and began to laugh.
+
+“What do you make of it, Miss West?” the mate asked.
+
+“He doesn’t seem to be in the water. He’s standing up.”
+
+Mr. Pike nodded.
+
+“He’s on the ladder,” he said. “I’d forgotten that. It fooled me at
+first. I couldn’t understand it.” He turned to the second mate. “Mr.
+Mellaire, will you launch the long boat and get some kind of a crew
+into it while I back the main-yard? I’ll go in the boat. Pick men that
+can pull an oar.”
+
+“You go, too,” Miss West said to me. “It will be an opportunity to get
+outside the _Elsinore_ and see her under full sail.”
+
+Mr. Pike nodded consent, so I went along, sitting near him in the
+stern-sheets where he steered, while half a dozen hands rowed us toward
+the suicide, who stood so weirdly upon the surface of the sea. The
+Maltese Cockney pulled the stroke oar, and among the other five men was
+one whose name I had but recently learned—Ditman Olansen, a Norwegian.
+A good seaman, Mr. Mellaire had told me, in whose watch he was; a good
+seaman, but “crank-eyed.” When pressed for an explanation Mr. Mellaire
+had said that he was the sort of man who flew into blind rages, and
+that one never could tell what little thing would produce such a rage.
+As near as I could grasp it, Ditman Olansen was a Berserker type. Yet,
+as I watched him pulling in good time at the oar, his large, pale-blue
+eyes seemed almost bovine—the last man in the world, in my judgment, to
+have a Berserker fit.
+
+As we drew close to the Greek he began to scream menacingly at us and
+to brandish a sheath-knife. His weight sank the ladder until the water
+washed his knees, and on this submerged support he balanced himself
+with wild writhing and outflinging of arms. His face, grimacing like a
+monkey’s, was not a pretty thing to look upon. And as he continued to
+threaten us with the knife I wondered how the problem of rescuing him
+would be solved.
+
+But I should have trusted Mr. Pike for that. He removed the
+boat-stretcher from under the Maltese Cockney’s feet and laid it close
+to hand in the stern-sheets. Then he had the men reverse the boat and
+back it upon the Greek. Dodging a sweep of the knife, Mr. Pike awaited
+his chance, until a passing wave lifted the boat’s stern high, while
+Tony was sinking toward the trough. This was the moment. Again I was
+favoured with a sample of the lightning speed with which that aged man
+of sixty-nine could handle his body. Timed precisely, and delivered in
+a flash and with weight, the boat-stretcher came down on the Greek’s
+head. The knife fell into the sea, and the demented creature collapsed
+and followed it, knocked unconscious. Mr. Pike scooped him out, quite
+effortlessly it seemed to me, and flung him into the boat’s bottom at
+my feet.
+
+The next moment the men were bending to their oars and the mate was
+steering back to the _Elsinore_. It was a stout rap Mr. Pike had
+administered with the boat-stretcher. Thin streaks of blood oozed on
+the damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp. I could but stare at
+the lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet. A man,
+all life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced the
+next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of death, is
+always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of the
+philosopher. And in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by
+means of a stick of wood brought sharply in contact with his skull.
+
+If Tony the Greek be accounted an _appearance_, what was he now?—a
+_disappearance_? And if so, whither had he disappeared? And whence
+would he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call
+consciousness returned to him? The first word, much less the last, of
+the phenomena of personality and consciousness yet remains to be
+uttered by the psychologists.
+
+Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle
+of the _Elsinore_ burst upon me. I had been so long on board, and in
+board of her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship. So low
+to the water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the tall,
+sky-reaching spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of canvas
+seemed preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of the law of
+gravitation. It required effort to realize that that slim curve of hull
+inclosed and bore up from the sea’s bottom five thousand tons of coal.
+And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites of men had conceived and
+constructed so stately and magnificent an element-defying fabric—mites
+of men, most woefully like the Greek at my feet, prone to precipitation
+into the blackness by means of a rap on the head with a piece of wood.
+
+Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned.
+From somewhere he was reappearing. I noticed Mr. Pike look at him
+quickly, as if apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would
+require more boat-stretcher. But Tony merely fluttered his big black
+eyes open and stared at me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere he
+closed them again.
+
+“What are you going to do with him?” I asked the mate.
+
+“Put ’m back to work,” was the reply. “It’s all he’s good for, and he
+ain’t hurt. Somebody’s got to work this ship around the Horn.”
+
+When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below. In
+the chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers. Mr. Mellaire
+had turned in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch on deck at
+noon. Mr. Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to state, does not
+sleep aft. He shares a room in the ’midship-house with Mr. Pike’s
+Nancy.
+
+Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek. He was bundled out
+upon Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended,
+to recover consciousness as he might elect. Yes, and so inured have I
+become that I make free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself. My
+eyes were still filled with the beauty of the _Elsinore_. One does grow
+hard at sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+One does not mind the trades. We have held the north-east trade for
+days now, and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls and
+tinkles on the taffrail. Yesterday, log and observation approximated a
+run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before we ran two
+hundred and forty, and the day before that two hundred and sixty-one.
+But one does not appreciate the force of the wind. So balmy and
+exhilarating is it that it is so much atmospheric wine. I delight to
+open my lungs and my pores to it. Nor does it chill. At any hour of the
+night, while the cabin lies asleep, I break off from my reading and go
+up on the poop in the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.
+
+I never knew before what the trade wind was. And now I am infatuated
+with it. I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever
+mate has the watch. Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr.
+Pike, on these delicious nights, stands his first watch after midnight
+in his pyjamas. He is a fearfully muscular man. Sixty-nine years seem
+impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed like
+fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge muscle. A
+splendid figure of a man! What he must have been in the hey-day of
+youth two score years and more ago passes comprehension.
+
+The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream. Here,
+where time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the
+watches, where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to
+one’s notice by the striking of the ship’s bells fore and aft, time
+ceases. Days merge into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for
+one, can never remember the day of the week or month.
+
+The _Elsinore_ is never totally asleep. Day and night, always, there
+are the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at
+the wheel, and the officer of the deck. I lie reading in my bunk, which
+is on the weather side, and continually over my head during the long
+night hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other, pacing up
+and down, and, as I well know, the man himself is forever peering
+for’ard from the break of the poop, or glancing into the binnacle, or
+feeling and gauging the weight and direction of wind on his cheek, or
+watching the cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud across the stars
+and the moon. Always, always, there are wakeful eyes on the _Elsinore_.
+
+Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o’clock, as I lay with
+the printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an
+abrupt outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike. I located him as at the break
+of the poop; and the man at whom he snarled was Larry, evidently on the
+main deck beneath him. Not until Wada brought me breakfast did I learn
+what had occurred.
+
+Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face,
+and his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some
+unlucky whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of darkness
+on the main deck. But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of the poop,
+had picked the offender unerringly. This was when the explosion
+occurred. Then the unfortunate Larry, truly half-devil and all child,
+had waxed sullen and retorted still more insolently; and the next he
+knew, the mate, descending upon him like a hurricane, had handcuffed
+him to the mizzen fife-rail.
+
+Imagine, on Mr. Pike’s part, that this was one for Larry and at least
+ten for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. I’ll not be so absurd
+as to say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters. I doubt if he has
+ever experienced fear. It is not in him. On the other hand, I am
+confident that he apprehends trouble from these men, and that it was
+for their benefit he made this example of Larry.
+
+Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his
+stupid brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because
+he bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair
+fight. Promptly Mr. Pike was there with the key to the handcuffs. As if
+Larry had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged man! Wada
+reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a couple of front
+teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day. When I met Mr. Pike on
+deck after eight o’clock I glanced at his knuckles. They verified
+Wada’s tale.
+
+I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little events
+like the foregoing. Not only has time ceased, but the world has ceased.
+Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these weeks I have
+received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no visitor. I have
+not been to the play. I have not read a newspaper. So far as I am
+concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers. All such things have
+vanished with the vanished world. All that exists is the _Elsinore_,
+with her queer human freightage and her cargo of coal, cleaving a
+rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen miles away.
+
+I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture, who
+for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be alive.
+Not until the world learned of his death was he anything but alive to
+the world. By the same token, was he not alive? And by the same token,
+here on the _Elsinore_, has not the land-world ceased? May not the
+pupil of one’s eye be, not merely the centre of the world, but the
+world itself? Truly, it is tenable that the world exists only in
+consciousness. “The world is my idea,” said Schopenhauer. Said Jules de
+Gaultier, “The world is my invention.” His dogma was that imagination
+created the Real. Ah, me, I know that the practical Miss West would dub
+my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful exercise of my wits.
+
+To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read _The Daughters of
+Herodias_ to Miss West. It was superb in its effect—just what I had
+expected of her. She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for
+her father while I read. (She is never idle, being so essentially a
+nest-maker and comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a whole
+pile of these handkerchiefs for her father.)
+
+She smiled, how shall I say?—oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh, with
+all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm, long
+gray eyes, when I read:
+
+“But they smile innocently and dance on,
+Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:
+‘Am I not beautiful? Shall I not be loved?’
+Be patient, for they will not understand,
+Not till the end of time will they put by
+The weaving of slow steps about men’s hearts.”
+
+
+“But it is well for the world that it is so,” was her comment.
+
+Ah, Symons knew women! His perfect knowledge she attested when I read
+that magnificent passage:
+
+“They do not understand that in the world
+There grows between the sunlight and the grass
+Anything save themselves desirable.
+It seems to them that the swift eyes of men
+Are made but to be mirrors, not to see
+Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.
+‘For are not we,’ they say, ‘the end of all?
+Why should you look beyond us? If you look
+Into the night, you will find nothing there:
+We also have gazed often at the stars.’”
+
+
+“It is true,” said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to see
+how she had received the thought. “We also have gazed often at the
+stars.”
+
+It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.
+
+“But wait,” I cried. “Let me read on.” And I read:
+
+“‘We, we alone among all beautiful things,
+We only are real: for the rest are dreams.
+Why will you follow after wandering dreams
+When we await you? And you can but dream
+Of us, and in our image fashion them.’”
+
+
+“True, most true,” she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and
+power mounted in her eyes.
+
+“A wonderful poem,” she conceded—nay, proclaimed—when I had done.
+
+“But do you not see . . .” I began impulsively, then abandoned the
+attempt. For how could she see, being woman, the “far-off, disastrous,
+unattainable things,” when she, as she so stoutly averred, had gazed
+often on the stars?
+
+She? What could she see, save what all women see—that they only are
+real, and that all the rest are dreams.
+
+“I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias,” said Miss West.
+
+“Well,” I admitted lamely, “we agree. You remember it is what I told
+you you were.”
+
+“I am grateful for the compliment,” she said; and in those long gray
+eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and
+self-certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so
+large a part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by
+woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+Heavens!—how I read in this fine weather. I take so little exercise
+that my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions,
+such as life teems with on the land, that I read myself almost stupid.
+Recommend me a sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind in his
+reading. I am making up years of it. It is an orgy, a debauch; and I am
+sure the addled sailors adjudge me the queerest creature on board.
+
+At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for
+any diversion. When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the
+north-east and the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my
+little twenty-two automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot. I used
+to shoot, when I was a wee lad. I can remember dragging a shot-gun
+around with me over the hills. Also, I possessed an air-rifle, with
+which, on great occasion, I was even able to slaughter a robin.
+
+While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space for
+deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from either
+side of the chart-house and that are of the width of the chart-house.
+This space again is restricted to one side or the other according to
+the slant of the morning and afternoon sun and the freshness of the
+breeze. Wherefore, Miss West’s chair and mine are most frequently side
+by side. Captain West has a chair, which he infrequently occupies. He
+has so little to do in the working of the ship, taking his regular
+observations and working them up with such celerity, that he is rarely
+in the chart-room for any length of time. He elects to spend his hours
+in the main cabin, not reading, not doing anything save dream with eyes
+wide open in the draught of wind that pours through the open ports and
+door from out the huge crojack and the jigger staysails.
+
+Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own
+laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father’s fine linen.
+In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All
+hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the
+deck-chair beside me. She avers that she loves the sea and the
+atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things
+and land-things along with her—even to her pretty china for afternoon
+tea.
+
+Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker. She is a born cook.
+The steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and _de luxe_ for
+the cabin table; yet Miss West is able at a moment’s notice to improve
+on these dishes. She never lets any of their dishes come on the table
+without first planning them or passing on them. She has quick judgment,
+an unerring taste, and is possessed of the needful steel of decision.
+It seems she has only to look at a dish, no matter who has cooked it,
+and immediately divine its lack or its surplusage, and prescribe a
+treatment that transforms it into something indescribably different and
+delicious—My, how I do eat! I am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing
+voracity of my appetite. Already am I quite convinced that I am glad
+Miss West is making the voyage.
+
+She has sailed “out East,” as she quaintly calls it, and has an
+enormous repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes. In the cooking of
+rice Louis is a master; but in the making of the accompanying curry he
+fades into a blundering amateur compared with Miss West. In the matter
+of curry she is a sheer genius. How often one’s thoughts dwell upon
+food when at sea!
+
+So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West. I read
+all the time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to her
+passages, and even books, with which I am interested in trying her out.
+Then, too, such reading gives rise to discussions, and she has not yet
+uttered anything that would lead me to change my first judgment of her.
+She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.
+
+And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl. She isn’t a girl,
+she is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl. She has the
+carriage, the attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and yet she
+cannot be described as being in the slightest degree stately. She is
+generous, dependable, sensible—yes, and sensitive; and her
+superabundant vitality, the vitality that makes her walk so gloriously,
+discounts the maturity of her. Sometimes she seems all of thirty to me;
+at other times, when her spirits and risibilities are aroused, she
+scarcely seems thirteen. I shall make a point of asking Captain West
+the date of the _Dixie’s_ collision with that river steamer in San
+Francisco Bay. In a word, she is the most normal, the most healthy,
+natural woman I have ever known.
+
+Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair,
+that it is as invariably smooth and well-groomed as all the rest of
+her. On the other hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved by
+the latitude of dress she allows herself. She never fails of being a
+woman. Her sex, and the lure of it, is ever present. Possibly she may
+possess high collars, but I have never seen her in one on board. Her
+blouses are always open at the throat, disclosing one of her choicest
+assets, the muscular, adequate neck, with its fine-textured garmenture
+of skin. I embarrass myself by stealing long glances at that bare
+throat of hers and at the hint of fine, firm-surfaced shoulder.
+
+Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function. At least
+once each day we make the journey for’ard along the bridge to the top
+of the ’midship-house. Possum, who is now convalescent, accompanies us.
+The steward makes a point of being there so as to receive instructions
+and report the egg-output and laying conduct of the many hens. At the
+present time our four dozen hens are laying two dozen eggs a day, with
+which record Miss West is greatly elated.
+
+Already she has given names to most of them. The cock is Peter, of
+course. A much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden. A slim, trim thing that
+dogs Peter’s heels she calls Cleopatra. Another hen—the
+mellowest-voiced one of all—she addresses as Bernhardt. One thing I
+have noted: whenever she and the steward have passed death sentence on
+a non-laying hen (which occurs regularly once a week), she takes no
+part in the eating of the meat, not even when it is metamorphosed into
+one of her delectable curries. At such times she has a special curry
+made for herself of tinned lobster, or shrimp, or tinned chicken.
+
+Ah, I must not forget. I have learned that it was no man-interest (in
+me, if you please) that brought about her sudden interest to come on
+the voyage. It was for her father that she came. Something is the
+matter with Captain West. At rare moments I have observed her gazing at
+him with a world of solicitude and anxiety in her eyes.
+
+I was telling an amusing story at table yesterday midday, when my
+glance chanced to rest upon Miss West. She was not listening. Her food
+on her fork was suspended in the air a sheer instant as she looked at
+her father with all her eyes. It was a stare of fear. She realized that
+I was observing, and with superb control, slowly, quite naturally, she
+lowered the fork and rested it on her plate, retaining her hold on it
+and retaining her father’s face in her look.
+
+But I had seen. Yes; I had seen more than that. I had seen Captain
+West’s face a transparent white, while his eyelids fluttered down and
+his lips moved noiselessly. Then the eyelids raised, the lips set again
+with their habitual discipline, and the colour slowly returned to his
+face. It was as if he had been away for a time and just returned. But I
+had seen, and guessed her secret.
+
+And yet it was this same Captain West, seven hours later, who chastened
+the proud sailor spirit of Mr. Pike. It was in the second dog-watch
+that evening, a dark night, and the watch was pulling away on the main
+deck. I had just come out of the chart-house door and seen Captain West
+pace by me, hands in pockets, toward the break of the poop. Abruptly,
+from the mizzen-mast, came a snap of breakage and crash of fabric. At
+the same instant the men fell backward and sprawled over the deck.
+
+A moment of silence followed, and then Captain West’s voice went out:
+
+“What carried away, Mr. Pike?”
+
+“The halyards, sir,” came the reply out of the darkness.
+
+There was a pause. Again Captain West’s voice went out.
+
+“Next time slack away on your sheet first.”
+
+Now Mr. Pike is incontestably a splendid seaman. Yet in this instance
+he had been wrong. I have come to know him, and I can well imagine the
+hurt to his pride. And more—he has a wicked, resentful, primitive
+nature, and though he answered respectfully enough, “Yes, sir,” I felt
+safe in predicting to myself that the poor devils under him would
+receive the weight of his resentment in the later watches of the night.
+
+They evidently did; for this morning I noted a black eye on John
+Hackey, a San Francisco hoodlum, and Guido Bombini was carrying a
+freshly and outrageously swollen jaw. I asked Wada about the matter,
+and he soon brought me the news. Quite a bit of beating up takes place
+for’ard of the deck-houses in the night watches while we of the
+after-guard peacefully slumber.
+
+Even to-day Mr. Pike is going around sullen and morose, snarling at the
+men more than usual, and barely polite to Miss West and me when we
+chance to address him. His replies are grunted in monosyllables, and
+his face is set in superlative sourness. Miss West who is unaware of
+the occurrence, laughs and calls it a “sea grouch”—a phenomenon with
+which she claims large experience.
+
+But I know Mr. Pike now—the stubborn, wonderful old sea-dog. It will be
+three days before he is himself again. He takes a terrible pride in his
+seamanship, and what hurts him most is the knowledge that he was guilty
+of the blunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+To-day, twenty-eight days out, in the early morning, while I was
+drinking my coffee, still carrying the north-east trade, we crossed the
+line. And Charles Davis signalized the event by murdering O’Sullivan.
+It was Boney, the lanky splinter of a youth in Mr. Mellaire’s watch,
+who brought the news. The second mate and I had just arrived in the
+hospital room, when Mr. Pike entered.
+
+O’Sullivan’s troubles were over. The man in the upper bunk had
+completed the mad, sad span of his life with the marlin-spike.
+
+I cannot understand this Charles Davis. He sat up calmly in his bunk,
+and calmly lighted his pipe ere he replied to Mr. Mellaire. He
+certainly is not insane. Yet deliberately, in cold blood, he has
+murdered a helpless man.
+
+“What’d you do it for?” Mr. Mellaire demanded.
+
+“Because, sir,” said Charles Davis, applying a second match to his
+pipe, “because”—puff, puff—“he bothered my sleep.” Here he caught Mr.
+Pike’s glowering eye. “Because”—puff, puff—“he annoyed me. The next
+time”—puff, puff—“I hope better judgment will be shown in what kind of
+a man is put in with me. Besides”—puff, puff—“this top bunk ain’t no
+place for me. It hurts me to get into it”—puff, puff—“an’ I’m goin’
+back to that lower bunk as soon as you get O’Sullivan out of it.”
+
+“But what’d you do it for?” Mr. Pike snarled.
+
+“I told you, sir, because he annoyed me. I got tired of it, an’ so,
+this morning, I just put him out of his misery. An’ what are you goin’
+to do about it? The man’s dead, ain’t he? An’ I killed ’m in
+self-defence. I know the law. What right’d you to put a ravin’ lunatic
+in with me, an’ me sick an’ helpless?”
+
+“By God, Davis!” the mate burst forth. “You’ll never draw your pay-day
+in Seattle. I’ll fix you out for this, killing a crazy lashed down in
+his bunk an’ harmless. You’ll follow ’m overside, my hearty.”
+
+“If I do, you’ll hang for it, sir,” Davis retorted. He turned his cool
+eyes on me. “An’ I call on you, sir, to witness the threats he’s made.
+An’ you’ll testify to them, too, in court. An’ he’ll hang as sure as I
+go over the side. Oh, I know his record. He’s afraid to face a court
+with it. He’s been up too many a time with charges of man-killin’ an’
+brutality on the high seas. An’ a man could retire for life an live off
+the interest of the fines he’s paid, or his owners paid for him—”
+
+“Shut your mouth or I’ll knock it out of your face!” Mr. Pike roared,
+springing toward him with clenched, up-raised fist.
+
+Davis involuntarily shrank away. His flesh was weak, but not so his
+spirit. He got himself promptly in hand and struck another match.
+
+“You can’t get my goat, sir,” he sneered, under the shadow of the
+impending blow. “I ain’t scared to die. A man’s got to die once anyway,
+an’ it’s none so hard a trick to do when you can’t help it. O’Sullivan
+died so easy it was amazin’. Besides, I ain’t goin’ to die. I’m goin’
+to finish this voyage, an’ sue the owners when I get to Seattle. I know
+my rights an’ the law. An’ I got witnesses.”
+
+Truly, I was divided between admiration for the courage of this
+wretched sailor and sympathy for Mr. Pike thus bearded by a sick man he
+could not bring himself to strike.
+
+Nevertheless he sprang upon the man with calculated fury, gripped him
+between the base of the neck and the shoulders with both gnarled paws,
+and shook him back and forth, violently and frightfully, for a full
+minute. It was a wonder the man’s neck was not dislocated.
+
+“I call on you to witness, sir,” Davis gasped at me the instant he was
+free.
+
+He coughed and strangled, felt his throat, and made wry neck-movements
+indicative of injury.
+
+“The marks’ll begin to show in a few minutes,” he murmured complacently
+as his dizziness left him and his breath came back.
+
+This was too much for Mr. Pike, who turned and left the room, growling
+and cursing incoherently, deep in his throat. When I made my departure,
+a moment later, Davis was refilling his pipe and telling Mr. Mellaire
+that he’d have him up for a witness in Seattle.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+So we have had another burial at sea. Mr. Pike was vexed by it because
+the _Elsinore_, according to sea tradition, was going too fast through
+the water for a proper ceremony. Thus a few minutes of the voyage were
+lost by backing the _Elsinore’s_ main-topsail and deadening her way
+while the service was read and O’Sullivan was slid overboard with the
+inevitable sack of coal at his feet.
+
+“Hope the coal holds out,” Mr. Pike grumbled morosely at me five
+minutes later.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended on by servants, sipping
+afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and art, while
+a few feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all the grimy,
+sordid tragedy of sordid, malformed, brutish life plays itself out. And
+Captain West, remote, untroubled, sits dreaming in the twilight cabin
+while the draught of wind from the crojack blows upon him through the
+open ports. He has no doubts, no worries. He believes in God. All is
+settled and clear and well as he nears his far home. His serenity is
+vast and enviable. But I cannot shake from my eyes that vision of him
+when life forsook his veins, and his mouth slacked, and his eyelids
+closed, while his face took on the white transparency of death.
+
+I wonder who will be the next to finish the game and depart with a sack
+of coal.
+
+“Oh, this is nothing, sir,” Mr. Mellaire remarked to me cheerfully as
+we strolled the poop during the first watch. “I was once on a voyage on
+a tramp steamer loaded with four hundred Chinks—I beg your pardon,
+sir—Chinese. They were coolies, contract labourers, coming back from
+serving their time.
+
+“And the cholera broke out. We hove over three hundred of them
+overboard, sir, along with both bosuns, most of the Lascar crew, and
+the captain, the mate, the third mate, and the first and third
+engineers. The second and one white oiler was all that was left below,
+and I was in command on deck, when we made port. The doctors wouldn’t
+come aboard. They made me anchor in the outer roads and told me to
+heave out my dead. There was some tall buryin’ about that time, Mr.
+Pathurst, and they went overboard without canvas, coal, or iron. They
+had to. I had nobody to help me, and the Chinks below wouldn’t lift a
+hand.
+
+“I had to go down myself, drag the bodies on to the slings, then climb
+on deck and heave them up with the donkey. And each trip I took a
+drink. I was pretty drunk when the job was done.”
+
+“And you never caught it yourself?” I queried. Mr. Mellaire held up his
+left hand. I had often noted that the index finger was missing.
+
+“That’s all that happened to me, sir. The old man’d had a fox-terrier
+like yours. And after the old man passed out the puppy got real, chummy
+with me. Just as I was making the hoist of the last sling-load, what
+does the puppy do but jump on my leg and sniff my hand. I turned to pat
+him, and the next I knew my other hand had slipped into the gears and
+that finger wasn’t there any more.
+
+“Heavens!” I cried. “What abominable luck to come through such a
+terrible experience like that and then lose your finger!”
+
+“That’s what I thought, sir,” Mr. Mellaire agreed.
+
+“What did you do?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, just held it up and looked at it, and said ‘My goodness gracious!’
+and took another drink.”
+
+“And you didn’t get the cholera afterwards?”
+
+“No, sir. I reckon I was so full of alcohol the germs dropped dead
+before they could get to me.” He considered a moment. “Candidly, Mr.
+Pathurst, I don’t know about that alcohol theory. The old man and the
+mates died drunk, and so did the third engineer. But the chief was a
+teetotaller, and he died, too.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Never again shall I wonder that the sea is hard. I walked apart from
+the second mate and stared up at the magnificent fabric of the
+_Elsinore_ sweeping and swaying great blotting curves of darkness
+across the face of the starry sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Something has happened. But nobody knows, either fore or aft, except
+the interested persons, and they will not say anything. Yet the ship is
+abuzz with rumours and guesses.
+
+This I do know: Mr. Pike has received a fearful blow on the head. At
+table, yesterday, at midday, I arrived late, and, passing behind his
+chair, I saw a prodigious lump on top of his head. When I was seated,
+facing him, I noted that his eyes seemed dazed; yes, and I could see
+pain in them. He took no part in the conversation, ate perfunctorily,
+behaved stupidly at times, and it was patent that he was controlling
+himself with an iron hand.
+
+And nobody dares ask him what has happened. I know I don’t dare ask
+him, and I am a passenger, a privileged person. This redoubtable old
+sea-relic has inspired me with a respect for him that partakes half of
+timidity and half of awe.
+
+He acts as if he were suffering from concussion of the brain. His pain
+is evident, not alone in his eyes and the strained expression of his
+face, but by his conduct when he thinks he is unobserved. Last night,
+just for a breath of air and a moment’s gaze at the stars, I came out
+of the cabin door and stood on the main deck under the break of the
+poop. From directly over my head came a low and persistent groaning. My
+curiosity was aroused, and I retreated into the cabin, came out softly
+on to the poop by way of the chart-house, and strolled noiselessly
+for’ard in my slippers. It was Mr. Pike. He was leaning collapsed on
+the rail, his head resting on his arms. He was giving voice in secret
+to the pain that racked him. A dozen feet away he could not be heard.
+But, close to his shoulder, I could hear his steady, smothered groaning
+that seemed to take the form of a chant. Also, at regular intervals, he
+would mutter:
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” Always he repeated the
+phrase five times, then returned to his groaning. I stole away as
+silently as I had come.
+
+Yet he resolutely stands his watches and performs all his duties of
+chief officer. Oh, I forgot. Miss West dared to quiz him, and he
+replied that he had a toothache, and that if it didn’t get better he’d
+pull it out.
+
+Wada cannot learn what has happened. There were no eye-witnesses. He
+says that the Asiatic clique, discussing the affair in the cook’s room,
+thinks the three gangsters are responsible. Bert Rhine is carrying a
+lame shoulder. Nosey Murphy is limping as from some injury in the hips.
+And Kid Twist has been so badly beaten that he has not left his bunk
+for two days. And that is all the data to build on. The gangsters are
+as close-mouthed as Mr. Pike. The Asiatic clique has decided that
+murder was attempted and that all that saved the mate was his hard
+skull.
+
+Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I got another proof that Captain
+West is not so oblivious of what goes on aboard the _Elsinore_ as he
+seems. I had gone for’ard along the bridge to the mizzen-mast, in the
+shadow of which I was leaning. From the main deck, in the alley-way
+between the ’midship-house and the rail, came the voices of Bert Rhine,
+Nosey Murphy, and Mr. Mellaire. It was not ship’s work. They were
+having a friendly, even sociable chat, for their voices hummed
+genially, and now and again one or another laughed, and sometimes all
+laughed.
+
+I remembered Wada’s reports on this unseamanlike intimacy of the second
+mate with the gangsters, and tried to make out the nature of the
+conversation. But the gangsters were low-voiced, and all I could catch
+was the tone of friendliness and good-nature.
+
+Suddenly, from the poop, came Captain West’s voice. It was the voice,
+not of the Samurai riding the storm, but of the Samurai calm and cold.
+It was clear, soft, and mellow as the mellowest bell ever cast by
+eastern artificers of old time to call worshippers to prayer. I know I
+slightly chilled to it—it was so exquisitely sweet and yet as
+passionless as the ring of steel on a frosty night. And I knew the
+effect on the men beneath me was electrical. I could _feel_ them
+stiffen and chill to it as I had stiffened and chilled. And yet all he
+said was:
+
+“Mr. Mellaire.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” answered Mr. Mellaire, after a moment of tense silence.
+
+“Come aft here,” came Captain West’s voice.
+
+I heard the second mate move along the deck beneath me and stop at the
+foot of the poop-ladder.
+
+“Your place is aft on the poop, Mr. Mellaire,” said the cold,
+passionless voice.
+
+“Yes, sir,” answered the second mate.
+
+That was all. Not another word was spoken. Captain West resumed his
+stroll on the weather side of the poop, and Mr. Mellaire, ascending the
+ladder, went to pacing up and down the lee side.
+
+I continued along the bridge to the forecastle head and purposely
+remained there half an hour ere I returned to the cabin by way of the
+main deck. Although I did not analyze my motive, I knew I did not
+desire any one to know that I had overheard the occurrence.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+I have made a discovery. Ninety per cent. of our crew is brunette. Aft,
+with the exception of Wada and the steward, who are our servants, we
+are all blonds. What led me to this discovery was Woodruff’s _Effects
+of Tropical Light on White Men_, which I am just reading. Major
+Woodruff’s thesis is that the white-skinned, blue-eyed Aryan, born to
+government and command, ever leaving his primeval, overcast and foggy
+home, ever commands and governs the rest of the world and ever perishes
+because of the too-white light he encounters. It is a very tenable
+hypothesis, and will bear looking into.
+
+But to return. Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a
+blond Aryan. For’ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate
+blonds, the remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us
+are brunettes. They will not perish. According to Woodruff, they will
+inherit the earth, not because of their capacity for mastery and
+government, but because of their skin-pigmentation which enables their
+tissues to resist the ravages of the sun.
+
+And I look at the four of us at table—Captain West, his daughter, Mr.
+Pike, and myself—all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet
+mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of our
+type on the earth. Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and though we
+may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of
+all peoples, disciplined them to obedience, taught them government, and
+dwelt in the palaces we have compelled them by the weight of our own
+right arms to build for us.
+
+The _Elsinore_ depicts this in miniature. The best of the food and all
+spacious and beautiful accommodation is ours. For’ard is a pig-sty and
+a slave-pen.
+
+As a king, Captain West sits above all. As a captain of soldiers, Mr.
+Pike enforces his king’s will. Miss West is a princess of the royal
+house. And I? Am I not an honourable, noble-lineaged pensioner on the
+deeds and achievements of my father, who, in his day, compelled
+thousands of the lesser types to the building of the fortune I enjoy?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+The north-west trade carried us almost into the south-east trade, and
+then left us for several days to roll and swelter in the doldrums.
+
+During this time I have discovered that I have a genius for
+rifle-shooting. Mr. Pike swore I must have had long practice; and I
+confess I was myself startled by the ease of the thing. Of course, it’s
+the knack; but one must be so made, I suppose, in order to be able to
+acquire the knack.
+
+By the end of half an hour, standing on the heaving deck and shooting
+at bottles floating on the rolling swell, I found that I broke each
+bottle at the first shot. The supply of empty bottles giving out, Mr.
+Pike was so interested that he had the carpenter saw me a lot of small
+square blocks of hard wood. These were more satisfactory. A well-aimed
+shot threw them out of the water and spinning into the air, and I could
+use a single block until it had drifted out of range. In an hour’s time
+I could, shooting quickly and at short range, empty my magazine at a
+block and hit it nine times, and, on occasion, ten times, out of
+eleven.
+
+I might not have judged my aptitude as unusual, had I not induced Miss
+West and Wada to try their hands. Neither had luck like mine. I finally
+persuaded Mr. Pike, and he went behind the wheel-house so that none of
+the crew might see how poor a shot he was. He was never able to hit the
+mark, and was guilty of the most ludicrous misses.
+
+“I never could get the hang of rifle-shooting,” he announced
+disgustedly, “but when it comes to close range with a gat I’m right
+there. I guess I might as well overhaul mine and limber it up.”
+
+He went below and came back with a huge ’44 automatic pistol and a
+handful of loaded clips.
+
+“Anywhere from right against the body up to ten or twelve feet away,
+holding for the stomach, it’s astonishing, Mr. Pathurst, what you can
+do with a weapon like this. Now you can’t use a rifle in a mix-up. I’ve
+been down and under, with a bunch giving me the boot, when I turned
+loose with this. Talk about damage! It ranged them the full length of
+their bodies. One of them’d just landed his brogans on my face when I
+let’m have it. The bullet entered just above his knee, smashed the
+collarbone, where it came out, and then clipped off an ear. I guess
+that bullet’s still going. It took more than a full-sized man to stop
+it. So I say, give me a good handy gat when something’s doing.”
+
+“Ain’t you afraid you’ll use all your ammunition up?” he asked
+anxiously half an hour later, as I continued to crack away with my new
+toy.
+
+He was quite reassured when I told him Wada had brought along fifty
+thousand rounds for me.
+
+In the midst of the shooting, two sharks came swimming around. They
+were quite large, Mr. Pike said, and he estimated their length at
+fifteen feet. It was Sunday morning, so that the crew, except for
+working the ship, had its time to itself, and soon the carpenter, with
+a rope for a fish-line and a great iron hook baited with a chunk of
+salt pork the size of my head, captured first one, and then the other,
+of the monsters. They were hoisted in on the main deck. And then I saw
+a spectacle of the cruelty of the sea.
+
+The full crew gathered about with sheath knives, hatchets, clubs, and
+big butcher knives borrowed from the galley. I shall not give the
+details, save that they gloated and lusted, and roared and bellowed
+their delight in the atrocities they committed. Finally, the first of
+the two fish was thrown back into the ocean with a pointed stake thrust
+into its upper and lower jaws so that it could not close its mouth.
+Inevitable and prolonged starvation was the fate thus meted out to it.
+
+“I’ll show you something, boys,” Andy Fay cried, as they prepared to
+handle the second shark.
+
+The Maltese Cockney had been a most capable master of ceremonies with
+the first one. More than anything else, I think, was I hardened against
+these brutes by what I saw them do. In the end, the maltreated fish
+thrashed about the deck entirely eviscerated. Nothing remained but the
+mere flesh-shell of the creature, yet it would not die. It was amazing
+the life that lingered when all the vital organs were gone. But more
+amazing things were to follow.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs, his arms a butcher’s to the elbows, without as much as
+“by your leave,” suddenly thrust a hunk of meat into my hand. I sprang
+back, startled, and dropped it to the deck, while a gleeful howl went
+up from the two-score men. I was shamed, despite myself. These brutes
+held me in little respect; and, after all, human nature is so strange a
+compound that even a philosopher dislikes being held in disesteem by
+the brutes of his own species.
+
+I looked at what I had dropped. It was the heart of the shark, and as I
+looked, there under my eyes, on the scorching deck where the pitch
+oozed from the seams, the heart pulsed with life.
+
+And I dared. I would not permit these animals to laugh at any
+fastidiousness of mine. I stooped and picked up the heart, and while I
+concealed and conquered my qualms I held it in my hand and felt it beat
+in my hand.
+
+At any rate, I had won a mild victory over Mulligan Jacobs; for he
+abandoned me for the more delectable diversion of torturing the shark
+that would not die. For several minutes it had been lying quite
+motionless. Mulligan Jacobs smote it a heavy blow on the nose with the
+flat of a hatchet, and as the thing galvanized into life and flung its
+body about the deck the little venomous man screamed in ecstasy:
+
+“The hooks are in it!—the hooks are in it!—and burnin’ hot!”
+
+He squirmed and writhed with fiendish delight, and again he struck it
+on the nose and made it leap.
+
+This was too much, and I beat a retreat—feigning boredom, or cessation
+of interest, of course; and absently carrying the still throbbing heart
+in my hand.
+
+As I came upon the poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket,
+emerging from the port door of the chart-house. The deck-chairs were on
+that side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-house
+in order to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I carried.
+But, drying on the surface in the tropic heat and still pulsing inside,
+it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad cast. Instead of clearing the
+railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck there in the shade, and as
+I opened the door to go below and wash my hands, with a last glance I
+saw it pulse where it had fallen.
+
+When I came back it was still pulsing. I heard a splash overside from
+the waist of the ship, and knew the carcass had been flung overboard. I
+did not go around the chart-house and join Miss West, but stood
+enthralled by the spectacle of that heart that beat in the tropic heat.
+
+Boisterous shouts from the sailors attracted my attention. They had all
+climbed to the top of the tall rail and were watching something
+outboard. I followed their gaze and saw the amazing thing. That
+long-eviscerated shark was not dead. It moved, it swam, it thrashed
+about, and ever it strove to escape from the surface of the ocean.
+Sometimes it swam down as deep as fifty or a hundred feet, and then,
+still struggling to escape the surface, struggled involuntarily to the
+surface. Each failure thus to escape fetched wild laughter from the
+men. But why did they laugh? The thing was sublime, horrible, but it
+was not humorous. I leave it to you. What is there laughable in the
+sight of a pain-distraught fish rolling helplessly on the surface of
+the sea and exposing to the sun all its essential emptiness?
+
+I was turning away, when renewed shouting drew my gaze. Half a dozen
+other sharks had appeared, smaller ones, nine or ten feet long. They
+attacked their helpless comrade. They tore him to pieces they destroyed
+him, devoured him. I saw the last shred of him disappear down their
+maws. He was gone, disintegrated, entombed in the living bodies of his
+kind, and already entering into the processes of digestion. And yet,
+there, in the shade on the pin-rail, that unbelievable and monstrous
+heart beat on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+The voyage is doomed to disaster and death. I know Mr. Pike, now, and
+if ever he discovers the identity of Mr. Mellaire, murder will be done.
+Mr. Mellaire is not Mr. Mellaire. He is not from Georgia. He is from
+Virginia. His name is Waltham—Sidney Waltham. He is one of the Walthams
+of Virginia, a black sheep, true, but a Waltham. Of this I am
+convinced, just as utterly as I am convinced that Mr. Pike will kill
+him if he learns who he is.
+
+Let me tell how I have discovered all this. It was last night, shortly
+before midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff of the
+south-east trades in which we are now bowling along, close-hauled in
+order to weather Cape San Roque. Mr. Pike had the watch, and I paced up
+and down with him while he told me old pages of his life. He has often
+done this, when not “sea-grouched,” and often he has mentioned with
+pride—yes, with reverence—a master with whom he sailed five years. “Old
+Captain Somers,” he called him—“the finest, squarest, noblest man I
+ever sailed under, sir.”
+
+Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr. Pike,
+wicked old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the world and
+on the wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain Somers.
+
+“He was an old man, over seventy years old,” Mr. Pike went on. “And
+they say he’d got a touch of palsy—I hadn’t seen him for years. You
+see, I’d had to clear out from the coast because of trouble. And that
+devil of a second mate caught him in bed late at night and beat him to
+death. It was terrible. They told me about it. Right in San Francisco,
+on board the _Jason Harrison_, it happened, eleven years ago.
+
+“And do you know what they did? First, they gave the murderer life,
+when he should have been hanged. His plea was insanity, from having had
+his head chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook. And when
+he’d served seven years the governor pardoned him. He wasn’t any good,
+but his people were a powerful old Virginian family, the Walthams—I
+guess you’ve heard of them—and they brought all kinds of pressure to
+bear. His name was Sidney Waltham.”
+
+At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes before
+the change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated by the
+look-out on the forecastle head. Mr. Pike, under his stress of feeling,
+had stopped walking, and we stood at the break of the poop. As chance
+would have it, Mr. Mellaire was a quarter of an hour ahead of time, and
+he climbed the poop-ladder and stood beside us while the mate concluded
+his tale.
+
+“I didn’t mind it,” Mr. Pike continued, “as long as he’d got life and
+was serving his time. But when they pardoned him out after only seven
+years I swore I’d get him. And I will. I don’t believe in God or devil,
+and it’s a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do believe in hunches. And
+I know I’m going to get him.”
+
+“What will you do?” I queried.
+
+“Do?” Mr. Pike’s voice was fraught with surprise that I should not
+know. “Do? Well, what did he do to old Captain Somers? Yet he’s
+disappeared these last three years now. I’ve heard neither hide nor
+hair of him. But he’s a sailor, and he’ll drift back to the sea, and
+some day . . . ”
+
+In the illumination of a match with which the second mate was lighting
+his pipe I saw Mr. Pike’s gorilla arms and huge clenched paws raised to
+heaven, and his face convulsed and working. Also, in that brief moment
+of light, I saw that the second mate’s hand which held the match was
+shaking.
+
+“And I ain’t never seen even a photo of him,” Mr. Pike added. “But I’ve
+got a general idea of his looks, and he’s got a mark unmistakable. I
+could know him by it in the dark. All I’d have to do is feel it. Some
+day I’ll stick my fingers into that mark.”
+
+“What did you say, sir, was the captain’s name?” Mr. Mellaire asked
+casually.
+
+“Somers—old Captain Somers,” Mr. Pike answered.
+
+Mr. Mellaire repeated the name aloud several times, and then hazarded:
+
+“Didn’t he command the _Lammermoor_ thirty years ago?”
+
+“That’s the man.”
+
+“I thought I recognized him. I lay at anchor in a ship next to his in
+Table Bay that time ago.”
+
+“Oh, the wickedness of the world, the wickedness of the world,” Mr.
+Pike muttered as he turned and strode away.
+
+I said good-night to the second mate and had started to go below, when
+he called to me in a low voice, “Mr. Pathurst!”
+
+I stopped, and then he said, hurriedly and confusedly:
+
+“Never mind, sir . . . I beg your pardon . . . I—I changed my mind.”
+
+Below, lying in my bunk, I found myself unable to read. My mind was
+bent on returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my
+will, the most gruesome speculations kept suggesting themselves.
+
+And then came Mr. Mellaire. He had slipped down the booby hatch into
+the big after-room and thence through the hallway to my room. He
+entered noiselessly, on clumsy tiptoes, and pressed his finger
+warningly to his lips. Not until he was beside my bunk did he speak,
+and then it was in a whisper.
+
+“I beg your pardon, sir, Mr. Pathurst . . . I—I beg your pardon; but,
+you see, sir, I was just passing, and seeing you awake I . . . I
+thought it would not inconvenience you to . . . you see, I thought I
+might just as well prefer a small favour . . . seeing that I would not
+inconvenience you, sir . . . I . . . I . . . ”
+
+I waited for him to proceed, and in the pause that ensued, while he
+licked his dry lips with his tongue, the thing ambushed in his skull
+peered at me through his eyes and seemed almost on the verge of leaping
+out and pouncing upon me.
+
+“Well, sir,” he began again, this time more coherently, “it’s just a
+little thing—foolish on my part, of course—a whim, so to say—but you
+will remember, near the beginning of the voyage, I showed you a scar on
+my head . . . a really small affair, sir, which I contracted in a
+misadventure. It amounts to a deformity, which it is my fancy to
+conceal. Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for
+instance, know that I carried such a deformity. A man is a man, sir—you
+understand—and you have not spoken of it to her?”
+
+“No,” I replied. “It just happens that I have not.”
+
+“Nor to anybody else?—to, say, Captain West?—or, say, Mr. Pike?”
+
+“No, I haven’t mentioned it to anybody,” I averred.
+
+He could not conceal the relief he experienced. The perturbation went
+out of his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back deeper
+into the recess of his skull.
+
+“The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will
+not mention that little matter to anybody. I suppose” (he smiled, and
+his voice was superlatively suave) “it is vanity on my part—you
+understand, I am sure.”
+
+I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that I
+desired to resume my reading.
+
+“I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?” His whole voice and
+manner had changed. It was practically a command, and I could almost
+see fangs, bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I
+fancied dwelt behind his eyes.
+
+“Certainly,” I answered coldly.
+
+“Thank you, sir—I thank you,” he said, and, without more ado, tiptoed
+from the room.
+
+Of course I did not read. How could I? Nor did I sleep. My mind ran on,
+and on, and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly before
+five, did I sink into my first doze.
+
+One thing is very evident. Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer of
+Captain Somers is on board the _Elsinore_. He has never glimpsed that
+prodigious fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire’s, or, rather, Sidney
+Waltham’s, skull. And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike. And I
+know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate. And I
+understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within and
+peers out through the eyes. I have recognized the same thing in the
+three gangsters for’ard. Like the second mate, they are prison birds.
+The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life has
+developed in all of them terrible other selves.
+
+Yes, and another thing is very evident. On board this ship, driving now
+through the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn, are all
+the elements of sea tragedy and horror. We are freighted with human
+dynamite that is liable at any moment to blow our tiny floating world
+to fragments.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+The days slip by. The south-east trade is brisk and small splashes of
+sea occasionally invade my open ports. Mr. Pike’s room was soaked
+yesterday. This is the most exciting thing that has happened for some
+time. The gangsters rule in the forecastle. Larry and Shorty have had a
+harmless _fight_. The hooks continue to burn in Mulligan Jacobs’s
+brain. Charles Davis resides alone in his little steel room, coming out
+only to get his food from the galley. Miss West plays and sings,
+doctors Possum, launders, and is forever otherwise busy with her fancy
+work. Mr. Pike runs the phonograph every other evening in the second
+dog-watch. Mr. Mellaire hides the cleft in his head. I keep his secret.
+And Captain West, more remote than ever, sits in the draught of wind in
+the twilight cabin.
+
+We are now thirty-seven days at sea, in which time, until to-day, we
+have not sighted a vessel. And to-day, at one time, no less than six
+vessels were visible from the deck. Not until I saw these ships was I
+able thoroughly to realize how lonely this ocean is.
+
+Mr. Pike tells me we are several hundred miles off the South American
+coast. And yet, only the other day, it seems, we were scarcely more
+distant from Africa. A big velvety moth fluttered aboard this morning,
+and we are filled with conjecture. How possibly could it have come from
+the South American coast these hundreds of miles in the teeth of the
+trades?
+
+The Southern Cross has been visible, of course, for weeks; the North
+Star has disappeared behind the bulge of the earth; and the Great Bear,
+at its highest, is very low. Soon it, too, will be gone and we shall be
+raising the Magellan Clouds.
+
+I remember the fight between Larry and Shorty. Wada reports that Mr.
+Pike watched it for some time, until, becoming incensed at their
+awkwardness, he clouted both of them with his open hands and made them
+stop, announcing that until they could make a better showing he
+intended doing all the fighting on the _Elsinore_ himself.
+
+It is a feat beyond me to realize that he is sixty-nine years old. And
+when I look at the tremendous build of him and at his fearful,
+man-handling hands, I conjure up a vision of him avenging Captain
+Somers’s murder.
+
+Life is cruel. Amongst the _Elsinore’s_ five thousand tons of coal are
+thousands of rats. There is no way for them to get out of their
+steel-walled prison, for all the ventilators are guarded with stout
+wire-mesh. On her previous voyage, loaded with barley, they increased
+and multiplied. Now they are imprisoned in the coal, and cannibalism is
+what must occur among them. Mr. Pike says that when we reach Seattle
+there will be a dozen or a score of survivors, huge fellows, the
+strongest and fiercest. Sometimes, passing the mouth of one ventilator
+that is in the after wall of the chart-house, I can hear their
+plaintive squealing and crying from far beneath in the coal.
+
+Other and luckier rats are in the ’tween decks for’ard, where all the
+spare suits of sails are stored. They come out and run about the deck
+at night, steal food from the galley, and lap up the dew. Which reminds
+me that Mr. Pike will no longer look at Possum. It seems, under his
+suggestion, that Wada trapped a rat in the donkey-engine room. Wada
+swears that it was the father of all rats, and that, by actual
+measurement, it scaled eighteen inches from nose to the tip of tail.
+Also, it seems that Mr. Pike and Wada, with the door shut in the
+former’s room, pitted the rat against Possum, and that Possum was
+licked. They were compelled to kill the rat themselves, while Possum,
+when all was over, lay down and had a fit.
+
+Now Mr. Pike abhors a coward, and his disgust with Possum is profound.
+He no longer plays with the puppy, nor even speaks to him, and,
+whenever he passes him on the deck, glowers sourly at him.
+
+I have been reading up the South Atlantic Sailing Directions, and I
+find that we are now entering the most beautiful sunset region in the
+world. And this evening we were favoured with a sample. I was in my
+quarters, overhauling my books, when Miss West called to me from the
+foot of the chart-house stairs:
+
+“Mr. Pathurst!—Come quick! Oh, do come quick! You can’t afford to miss
+it!”
+
+Half the sky, from the zenith to the western sea-line, was an
+astonishing sheet of pure, pale, even gold. And through this sheen, on
+the horizon, burned the sun, a disc of richer gold. The gold of the sky
+grew more golden, then tarnished before our eyes and began to glow
+faintly with red. As the red deepened, a mist spread over the whole
+sheet of gold and the burning yellow sun. Turner was never guilty of so
+audacious an orgy in gold-mist.
+
+Presently, along the horizon, entirely completing the circle of sea and
+sky, the tight-packed shapes of the trade wind clouds began to show
+through the mist; and as they took form they spilled with rose-colour
+at their upper edges, while their bases were a pulsing, bluish-white. I
+say it advisedly. All the colours of this display _pulsed_.
+
+As the gold-mist continued to clear away, the colours became garish,
+bold; the turquoises went into greens and the roses turned to the red
+of blood. And the purple and indigo of the long swells of sea were
+bronzed with the colour-riot in the sky, while across the water, like
+gigantic serpents, crawled red and green sky-reflections. And then all
+the gorgeousness quickly dulled, and the warm, tropic darkness drew
+about us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+
+The _Elsinore_ is truly the ship of souls, the world in miniature; and,
+because she is such a small world, cleaving this vastitude of ocean as
+our larger world cleaves space, the strange juxtapositions that
+continually occur are startling.
+
+For instance, this afternoon on the poop. Let me describe it. Here was
+Miss West, in a crisp duck sailor suit, immaculately white, open at the
+throat, where, under the broad collar, was knotted a man-of-war black
+silk neckerchief. Her smooth-groomed hair, a trifle rebellious in the
+breeze, was glorious. And here was I, in white ducks, white shoes, and
+white silk shirt, as immaculate and well-tended as she. The steward was
+just bringing the pretty tea-service for Miss West, and in the
+background Wada hovered.
+
+We had been discussing philosophy—or, rather, I had been feeling her
+out; and from a sketch of Spinoza’s anticipations of the modern mind,
+through the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in
+physics of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as
+usual, to De Casseres, whom I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled orders
+to the watch.
+
+“‘In this rise into the azure of pure perception, attainable only by a
+very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born,’.” I was quoting.
+“‘Life is no longer good or evil. It is a perpetual play of forces
+without beginning or end. The freed Intellect merges itself with the
+World-Will and partakes of its essence, which is not a moral essence
+but an æsthetic essence . . . ”
+
+And at this moment the watch swarmed on to the poop to haul on the
+port-braces of the mizzen-sky-sail, royal and topgallant-sail. The
+sailors passed us, or toiled close to us, with lowered eyes. They did
+not look at us, so far removed from them were we. It was this contrast
+that caught my fancy. Here were the high and low, slaves and masters,
+beauty and ugliness, cleanness and filth. Their feet were bare and
+scaled with patches of tar and pitch. Their unbathed bodies were
+garmented in the meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty, ragged, and sparse.
+Each one had on but two garments—dungaree trousers and a shoddy cotton
+shirt.
+
+And we, in our comfortable deck-chairs, our two servants at our backs,
+the quintessence of elegant leisure, sipped delicate tea from
+beautiful, fragile cups, and looked on at these wretched ones whose
+labour made possible the journey of our little world. We did not speak
+to them, nor recognize their existence, any more than would they have
+dared speak to us.
+
+And Miss West, with the appraising eye of a plantation mistress for the
+condition of her field slaves, looked them over.
+
+“You see how they have fleshed up,” she said, as they coiled the last
+turns of the ropes over the pins and faded away for’ard off the poop.
+“It is the regular hours, the good weather, the hard work, the open
+air, the sufficient food, and the absence of whisky. And they will keep
+in this fettle until they get off the Horn. And then you will see them
+go down from day to day. A winter passage of the Horn is always a
+severe strain on the men.
+
+“But then, once we are around and in the good weather of the Pacific,
+you will see them gain again from day to day. And when we reach Seattle
+they will be in splendid shape. Only they will go ashore, drink up
+their wages in several days, and ship away on other vessels in
+precisely the same sodden, miserable condition that they were in when
+they sailed with us from Baltimore.”
+
+And just then Captain West came out the chart-house door, strolled by
+for a single turn up and down, and with a smile and a word for us and
+an all-observant eye for the ship, the trim of her sails, the wind, and
+the sky, and the weather promise, went back through the chart-house
+door—the blond Aryan master, the king, the Samurai.
+
+And I finished sipping my tea of delicious and most expensive aroma,
+and our slant-eyed, dark-skinned servitors carried the pretty gear
+away, and I read, continuing De Casseres:
+
+“‘Instinct wills, creates, carries on the work of the species. The
+Intellect destroys, negatives, satirizes and ends in pure nihilism,
+instinct creates life, endlessly, hurling forth profusely and blindly
+its clowns, tragedians and comedians. Intellect remains the eternal
+spectator of the play. It participates at will, but never gives itself
+wholly to the fine sport. The Intellect, freed from the trammels of the
+personal will, soars into the ether of perception, where Instinct
+follows it in a thousand disguises, seeking to draw it down to earth.’”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+We are now south of Rio and working south. We are out of the latitude
+of the trades, and the wind is capricious. Rain squalls and wind
+squalls vex the _Elsinore_. One hour we may be rolling sickeningly in a
+dead calm, and the next hour we may be dashing fourteen knots through
+the water and taking off sail as fast as the men can clew up and lower
+away. A night of calm, when sleep is well-nigh impossible in the
+sultry, muggy air, may be followed by a day of blazing sun and an oily
+swell from the south’ard, connoting great gales in that area of ocean
+we are sailing toward—or all day long the _Elsinore_, under an overcast
+sky, royals and sky sails furled, may plunge and buck under
+wind-pressure into a short and choppy head-sea.
+
+And all this means work for the men. Taking Mr. Pike’s judgment, they
+are very inadequate, though by this time they know the ropes. He growls
+and grumbles, and snorts and sneers whenever he watches them doing
+anything. To-day, at eleven in the morning, the wind was so violent,
+continuing in greater gusts after having come in a great gust, that Mr.
+Pike ordered the mainsail taken off. The great crojack was already off.
+But the watch could not clew up the mainsail, and, after much vain
+sing-songing and pull-hauling, the watch below was routed out to bear a
+hand.
+
+“My God!” Mr. Pike groaned to me. “Two watches for a rag like that when
+half a decent watch could do it! Look at that preventer bosun of mine!”
+
+Poor Nancy! He looked the saddest, sickest, bleakest creature I had
+ever seen. He was so wretched, so miserable, so helpless. And Sundry
+Buyers was just as impotent. The expression on his face was of pain and
+hopelessness, and as he pressed his abdomen he lumbered futilely about,
+ever seeking something he might do and ever failing to find it. He
+pottered. He would stand and stare at one rope for a minute or so at a
+time, following it aloft with his eyes through the maze of ropes and
+stabs and gears with all the intentness of a man working out an
+intricate problem. Then, holding his hand against his stomach, he would
+lumber on a few steps and select another rope for study.
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr. Pike lamented. “How can one drive with bosuns
+like that and a crew like that? Just the same, if I was captain of this
+ship I’d drive ’em. I’d show ’em what drive was, if I had to lose a few
+of them. And when they grow weak off the Horn what’ll we do? It’ll be
+both watches all the time, which will weaken them just that much the
+faster.”
+
+Evidently this winter passage of the Horn is all that one has been led
+to expect from reading the narratives of the navigators. Iron men like
+the two mates are very respectful of “Cape Stiff,” as they call that
+uttermost tip of the American continent. Speaking of the two mates,
+iron-made and iron-mouthed that they are, it is amusing that in really
+serious moments both of them curse with “Oh dear, oh dear.”
+
+In the spells of calm I take great delight in the little rifle. I have
+already fired away five thousand rounds, and have come to consider
+myself an expert. Whatever the knack of shooting may be, I’ve got it.
+When I get back I shall take up target practice. It is a neat, deft
+sport.
+
+Not only is Possum afraid of the sails and of rats, but he is afraid of
+rifle-fire, and at the first discharge goes yelping and ki-yi-ing
+below. The dislike Mr. Pike has developed for the poor little puppy is
+ludicrous. He even told me that if it were his dog he’d throw it
+overboard for a target. Just the same, he is an affectionate,
+heart-warming little rascal, and has already crept so deep into my
+heart that I am glad Miss West did not accept him.
+
+And—oh!—he insists on sleeping with me on top the bedding; a proceeding
+which has scandalized the mate. “I suppose he’ll be using your
+toothbrush next,” Mr. Pike growled at me. But the puppy loves my
+companionship, and is never happier than when on the bed with me. Yet
+the bed is not entirely paradise, for Possum is badly frightened when
+ours is the lee side and the seas pound and smash against the glass
+ports. Then the little beggar, electric with fear to every hair tip,
+crouches and snarls menacingly and almost at the same time whimpers
+appeasingly at the storm-monster outside.
+
+“Father _knows_ the sea,” Miss West said to me this afternoon. “He
+understands it, and he loves it.”
+
+“Or it may be habit,” I ventured.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“He does know it. And he loves it. That is why he has come back to it.
+All his people before him were sea folk. His grandfather, Anthony West,
+made forty-six voyages between 1801 and 1847. And his father, Robert,
+sailed master to the north-west coast before the gold days and was
+captain of some of the fastest Cape Horn clippers after the gold
+discovery. Elijah West, father’s great-grandfather, was a privateersman
+in the Revolution. He commanded the armed brig _New Defence_. And, even
+before that, Elijah’s father, in turn, and Elijah’s father’s father,
+were masters and owners on long-voyage merchant adventures.
+
+“Anthony West, in 1813 and 1814, commanded the _David Bruce_, with
+letters of marque. He was half-owner, with Gracie & Sons as the other
+half-owners. She was a two-hundred-ton schooner, built right up in
+Maine. She carried a long eighteen-pounder, two ten-pounders, and ten
+six-pounders, and she sailed like a witch. She ran the blockade off
+Newport and got away to the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay. And,
+do you know, though she only cost twelve thousand dollars all told, she
+took over three hundred thousand dollars of British prizes. A brother
+of his was on the _Wasp_.
+
+“So, you see, the sea is in our blood. She is our mother. As far back
+as we can trace all our line was born to the sea.” She laughed and went
+on. “We’ve pirates and slavers in our family, and all sorts of
+disreputable sea-rovers. Old Ezra West, just how far back I don’t
+remember, was executed for piracy and his body hung in chains at
+Plymouth.
+
+“The sea is father’s blood. And he knows, well, a ship, as you would
+know a dog or a horse. Every ship he sails has a distinct personality
+for him. I have watched him, in high moments, and _seen_ him think. But
+oh! the times I have seen him when he does not think—when he _feels_
+and knows everything without thinking at all. Really, with all that
+appertains to the sea and ships, he is an artist. There is no other
+word for it.”
+
+“You think a great deal of your father,” I remarked.
+
+“He is the most wonderful man I have ever known,” she replied.
+“Remember, you are not seeing him at his best. He has never been the
+same since mother’s death. If ever a man and woman were one, they
+were.” She broke off, then concluded abruptly. “You don’t know him. You
+don’t know him at all.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+
+“I think we are going to have a fine sunset,” Captain West remarked
+last evening.
+
+Miss West and I abandoned our rubber of cribbage and hastened on deck.
+The sunset had not yet come, but all was preparing. As we gazed we
+could see the sky gathering the materials, grouping the gray clouds in
+long lines and towering masses, spreading its palette with
+slow-growing, glowing tints and sudden blobs of colour.
+
+“It’s the Golden Gate!” Miss West cried, indicating the west. “See!
+We’re just inside the harbour. Look to the south there. If that isn’t
+the sky-line of San Francisco! There’s the Call Building, and there,
+far down, the Ferry Tower, and surely that is the Fairmount.” Her eyes
+roved back through the opening between the cloud masses, and she
+clapped her hands. “It’s a sunset within a sunset! See! The
+Farallones!”—swimming in a miniature orange and red sunset all their
+own. “Isn’t it the Golden Gate, and San Francisco, and the Farallones?”
+She appealed to Mr. Pike, who, leaning near, on the poop-rail, was
+divided between gazing sourly at Nancy pottering on the main deck and
+sourly at Possum, who, on the bridge, crouched with terror each time
+the crojack flapped emptily above him.
+
+The mate turned his head and favoured the sky picture with a solemn
+stare.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” he growled. “It may look like the Farallones to
+you, but to me it looks like a battleship coming right in the Gate with
+a bone in its teeth at a twenty-knot clip.”
+
+Sure enough. The floating Farallones had metamorphosed into a giant
+warship.
+
+Then came the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was
+green, green, green—the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and
+yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green,
+gold green, and a copper green. And all these greens were rich green
+beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even
+as we gazed upon it, going out of the gray clouds and into the sea,
+which assumed the exquisite golden pink of polished copper, while the
+hollows of the smooth and silken ripples were touched by a most
+ethereal pea green.
+
+The gray clouds became a long, low swathe of ruby red, or garnet
+red—such as one sees in a glass of heavy burgundy when held to the
+light. There was such depth to this red! And, below it, separated from
+the main colour-mass by a line of gray-white fog, or line of sea, was
+another and smaller streak of ruddy-coloured wine.
+
+I strolled across the poop to the port side.
+
+“Oh! Come back! Look! Look!” Miss West cried to me.
+
+“What’s the use?” I answered. “I’ve something just as good over here.”
+
+She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike’s
+face.
+
+The eastern heavens were equally spectacular. That quarter of the sky
+was sheer and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which
+faded, changed, through every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose, all
+trembling, palpitating, with misty blue tinting into pink. The
+reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon the water made of the sea a
+glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue, Nile-green, and
+salmon-pink. It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that veneered and
+flossed the softly moving, wavy water.
+
+And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted
+mist of the sky-shell.
+
+In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely different
+sunset—what would be accounted a very excellent orange-and-red sunset
+anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and tinted on all
+their under edges.
+
+“Huh!” Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our
+fresh discovery. “Look at the sunset I got here to the north. It ain’t
+doing so badly now, I leave it to you.”
+
+And it wasn’t. The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and
+cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the
+horizon to the zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time
+in the sky! Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a sunset
+distinctly its own.
+
+And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still misty,
+wept tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea. And then
+came the hush of darkness and the night, and we came to ourselves, out
+of reverie, sated with beauty, leaning toward each other as we leaned
+upon the rail side by side.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+I never grow tired of watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort
+of resemblance to several of Washington’s portraits. He is six feet of
+aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately
+grace of movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and
+manner he is the perfect old-type New England gentleman.
+
+He has the same gray eyes as his daughter, although his are genial
+rather than warm; and his eyes have the same trick of smiling. His skin
+is pinker than hers, and his brows and lashes are fairer. But he seems
+removed beyond passion, or even simple enthusiasm. Miss West is firm,
+like her father; but there is warmth in her firmness. He is clean, he
+is sweet and courteous; but he is coolly sweet, coolly courteous. With
+all his certain graciousness, in cabin or on deck, so far as his social
+equals are concerned, his graciousness is cool, elevated, thin.
+
+He is the perfect master of the art of doing nothing. He never reads,
+except the Bible; yet he is never bored. Often, I note him in a
+deck-chair, studying his perfect finger-nails, and, I’ll swear, not
+seeing them at all. Miss West says he loves the sea. And I ask myself a
+thousand times, “But how?” He shows no interest in any phase of the
+sea. Although he called our attention to the glorious sunset I have
+just described, he did not remain on deck to enjoy it. He sat below, in
+the big leather chair, not reading, not dozing, but merely gazing
+straight before him at nothing.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The days pass, and the seasons pass. We left Baltimore at the tail-end
+of winter, went into spring and on through summer, and now we are in
+fall weather and urging our way south to the winter of Cape Horn. And
+as we double the Cape and proceed north, we shall go through spring and
+summer—a long summer—pursuing the sun north through its declination and
+arriving at Seattle in summer. And all these seasons have occurred, and
+will have occurred, in the space of five months.
+
+Our white ducks are gone, and, in south latitude thirty-five, we are
+wearing the garments of a temperate clime. I notice that Wada has given
+me heavier underclothes and heavier pyjamas, and that Possum, of
+nights, is no longer content with the top of the bed but must crawl
+underneath the bed-clothes.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+We are now off the Plate, a region notorious for storms, and Mr. Pike
+is on the lookout for a pampero. Captain West does not seem to be on
+the lookout for anything; yet I notice that he spends longer hours on
+deck when the sky and barometer are threatening.
+
+Yesterday we had a hint of Plate weather, and to-day an awesome fiasco
+of the same. The hint came last evening between the twilight and the
+dark. There was practically no wind, and the _Elsinore_, just
+maintaining steerage way by means of intermittent fans of air from the
+north, floundered exasperatingly in a huge glassy swell that rolled up
+as an echo from some blown-out storm to the south.
+
+Ahead of us, arising with the swiftness of magic, was a dense
+slate-blackness. I suppose it was cloud-formation, but it bore no
+semblance to clouds. It was merely and sheerly a blackness that towered
+higher and higher until it overhung us, while it spread to right and
+left, blotting out half the sea.
+
+And still the light puffs from the north filled our sails; and still,
+as the _Elsinore_ floundered on the huge, smooth swells and the sails
+emptied and flapped a hollow thunder, we moved slowly towards that
+ominous blackness. In the east, in what was quite distinctly an active
+thunder cloud, the lightning fairly winked, while the blackness in
+front of us was rent with blobs and flashes of lightning.
+
+The last puffs left us, and in the hushes, between the rumbles of the
+nearing thunder, the voices of the men aloft on the yards came to one’s
+ear as if they were right beside one instead of being hundreds of feet
+away and up in the air. That they were duly impressed by what was
+impending was patent from the earnestness with which they worked. Both
+watches toiled under both mates, and Captain West strolled the poop in
+his usual casual way, and gave no orders at all, save in low
+conversational tones, when Mr. Pike came upon the poop and conferred
+with him.
+
+Miss West, having deserted the scene five minutes before, returned, a
+proper sea-woman, clad in oil-skins, sou’wester, and long sea-boots.
+She ordered me, quite peremptorily, to do the same. But I could not
+bring myself to leave the deck for fear of missing something, so I
+compromised by having Wada bring my storm-gear to me.
+
+And then the wind came, smack out of the blackness, with the abruptness
+of thunder and accompanied by the most diabolical thunder. And with the
+rain and thunder came the blackness. It was tangible. It drove past us
+in the bellowing wind like so much stuff that one could feel. Blackness
+as well as wind impacted on us. There is no other way to describe it
+than by the old, ancient old, way of saying one could not see his hand
+before his face.
+
+“Isn’t it splendid!” Miss West shouted into my ear, close beside me, as
+we clung to the railing of the break of the poop.
+
+“Superb!” I shouted back, my lips to her ear, so that her hair tickled
+my face.
+
+And, I know not why—it must have been spontaneous with both of us—in
+that shouting blackness of wind, as we clung to the rail to avoid being
+blown away, our hands went out to each other and my hand and hers
+gripped and pressed and then held mutually to the rail.
+
+“Daughter of Herodias,” I commented grimly to myself; but my hand did
+not leave hers.
+
+“What is happening?” I shouted in her ear.
+
+“We’ve lost way,” came her answer. “I think we’re caught aback! The
+wheel’s up, but she could not steer!”
+
+The Gabriel voice of the Samurai rang out. “Hard over?” was his mellow
+storm-call to the man at the wheel. “Hard over, sir,” came the
+helmsman’s reply, vague, cracked with strain, and smothered.
+
+Came the lightning, before us, behind us, on every side, bathing us in
+flaming minutes at a time. And all the while we were deafened by the
+unceasing uproar of thunder. It was a weird sight—far aloft the black
+skeleton of spars and masts from which the sails had been removed;
+lower down, the sailors clinging like monstrous bugs as they passed the
+gaskets and furled; beneath them the few set sails, filled backward
+against the masts, gleaming whitely, wickedly, evilly, in the fearful
+illumination; and, at the bottom, the deck and bridge and houses of the
+_Elsinore_, and a tangled riff-raff of flying ropes, and clumps and
+bunches of swaying, pulling, hauling, human creatures.
+
+It was a great moment, the master’s moment—caught all aback with all
+our bulk and tonnage and infinitude of gear, and our heaven-aspiring
+masts two hundred feet above our heads. And our master was there, in
+sheeting flame, slender, casual, imperturbable, with two men—one of
+them a murderer—under him to pass on and enforce his will, and with a
+horde of inefficients and weaklings to obey that will, and pull, and
+haul, and by the sheer leverages of physics manipulate our floating
+world so that it would endure this fury of the elements.
+
+What happened next, what was done, I do not know, save that now and
+again I heard the Gabriel voice; for the darkness came, and the rain in
+pouring, horizontal sheets. It filled my mouth and strangled my lungs
+as if I had fallen overboard. It seemed to drive up as well as down,
+piercing its way under my sou’wester, through my oilskins, down my
+tight-buttoned collar, and into my sea-boots. I was dizzied,
+obfuscated, by all this onslaught of thunder, lightning, wind,
+blackness, and water. And yet the master, near to me, there on the
+poop, lived and moved serenely in all, voicing his wisdom and will to
+the wisps of creatures who obeyed and by their brute, puny strength
+pulled braces, slacked sheets, dragged courses, swung yards and lowered
+them, hauled on buntlines and clewlines, smoothed and gasketed the huge
+spreads of canvas.
+
+How it happened I know not, but Miss West and I crouched together,
+clinging to the rail and to each other in the shelter of the thrumming
+weather-cloth. My arm was about her and fast to the railing; her
+shoulder pressed close against me, and by one hand she held tightly to
+the lapel of my oilskin.
+
+An hour later we made our way across the poop to the chart-house,
+helping each other to maintain footing as the _Elsinore_ plunged and
+bucked in the rising sea and was pressed over and down by the weight of
+wind on her few remaining set sails. The wind, which had lulled after
+the rain, had risen in recurrent gusts to storm violence. But all was
+well with the gallant ship. The crisis was past, and the ship lived,
+and we lived, and with streaming faces and bright eyes we looked at
+each other and laughed in the bright light of the chart-room.
+
+“Who can blame one for loving the sea?” Miss West cried out exultantly,
+as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had gone adrift in
+the turmoil. “And the men of the sea!” she cried. “The masters of the
+sea! You saw my father . . . ”
+
+“He is a king,” I said.
+
+“He is a king,” she repeated after me.
+
+And the _Elsinore_ lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side,
+so that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the
+wall.
+
+I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed the
+open door to the cabin I glanced in. There sat Captain West, whom I had
+thought still on deck. His storm-trappings were removed, his sea-boots
+replaced by slippers; and he leaned back in the big leather chair, eyes
+wide open, beholding visions in the curling smoke of a cigar against a
+background of wildly reeling cabin wall.
+
+It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco. Last
+night’s was a real pampero—though a mild one. To-day’s promised to be a
+far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke. The
+wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had
+all our topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a dead calm. By
+eleven the stuff began making up ominously in the south’ard.
+
+The overcast sky closed down. Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the
+cloud-zenith. The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half a
+mile away. The _Elsinore_ was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and
+sea. The lightning played. Sky and horizon drew so close that the
+_Elsinore_ seemed on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it,
+sucked up by it.
+
+Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked lightning,
+and the wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green. The rain, beginning
+gently, in dead calm, grew into a deluge of enormous streaming drops.
+It grew darker and darker, a green darkness, and in the cabin, although
+it was midday, Wada and the steward lighted lamps. The lightning came
+closer and closer, until the ship was enveloped in it. The green
+darkness was continually a-tremble with flame, through which broke
+greater illuminations of forked lightning. These became more violent as
+the rain lessened, and, so absolutely were we centred in this
+electrical maelstrom, there was no connecting any chain or flash or
+fork of lightning with any particular thunder-clap. The atmosphere all
+about us paled and flamed. Such a crashing and smashing! We looked
+every moment for the _Elsinore_ to be struck. And never had I seen such
+colours in lightning. Although from moment to moment we were dazzled by
+the greater bolts, there persisted always a tremulous, pulsing lesser
+play of light, sometimes softly blue, at other times a thin purple that
+quivered on into a thousand shades of lavender.
+
+And there was no wind. No wind came. Nothing happened. The _Elsinore_,
+naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and crojack
+furled, was prepared for anything. Her lower-topsails hung in limp
+emptiness from the yards, heavy with rain and flapping soggily when she
+rolled. The cloud mass thinned, the day brightened, the green blackness
+passed into gray twilight, the lightning eased, the thunder moved along
+away from us, and there was no wind. In half an hour the sun was
+shining, the thunder muttered intermittently along the horizon, and the
+_Elsinore_ still rolled in a hush of air.
+
+“You can’t tell, sir,” Mr. Pike growled to me. “Thirty years ago I was
+dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come on just
+as that come on.”
+
+It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on
+the poop to relieve the mate, stood beside me.
+
+“One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world,” he concurred.
+“Eighteen years ago the Plate gave it to me—lost half our sticks,
+twenty hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered. I was two
+days in the boat before an English tramp picked us up. And none of the
+other boats ever was picked up.”
+
+“The _Elsinore_ behaved very well last night,” I put in cheerily.
+
+“Oh, hell, that wasn’t nothing,” Mr. Pike grumbled. “Wait till you see
+a real pampero. It’s a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one, ’ll be
+glad when we get across It. I’d sooner have a dozen Cape Horn snorters
+than one of these. How about you, Mr. Mellaire?”
+
+“Same here, sir,” he answered. “Those sou’-westers are honest. You know
+what to expect. But here you never know. The best of ship-masters can
+get tripped up off the Plate.”
+
+“‘As I’ve found out . . .
+Beyond a doubt,”
+
+
+Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb’s _Celeste_, as he went down the ladder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+
+The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the
+Argentine. Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden,
+flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while
+in the east was painted a second sunset—a reflection, perhaps, of the
+first. At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds that shed
+soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea.
+
+And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the west.
+Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier, spacious
+and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and
+more celestial than that of the Colorado. The clouds took on the same
+stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the hollows were
+filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands.
+
+The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the
+dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the
+pampas of the Argentine.
+
+And our sunset to-night—I am writing this at midnight, as I sit propped
+in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the _Elsinore_ wallows
+damnably in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn
+region, where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow. But our sunset.
+Turner might have perpetrated it. The west was as if a painter had
+stood off and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green canvas. On this
+green background of sky the clouds spilled and crumpled.
+
+But such a background! Such an orgy of green! No shade of green was
+missing in the interstices, large and small, between the milky, curdled
+clouds—Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand
+shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful
+olive-green that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.
+
+During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
+pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the
+sun was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered
+a wine-red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged all the
+fading greens with its sanguinary hue. The clouds themselves flushed to
+rose of all shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of pale rose
+radiated toward the zenith. These deepened rapidly into flaunting
+rose-flame and burned long in the slow-closing twilight.
+
+And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in my
+brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my head,
+and the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to rope and
+pull and haul. More weather is making, and from the way sail is being
+taken in it cannot be far off.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
+calm and sickly swell. Miss West says the barometer is down, but that
+the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to anything.
+Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the _Elsinore_, under bare
+poles to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it may well be
+that they will be crowding on canvas in another hour.
+
+Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails,
+and the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai came
+on deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then spoke in
+an undertone to Mr. Pike. Mr. Pike did not like it. To me, a tyro, it
+was evident that he disagreed with his master. Nevertheless, his voice
+went out in a snarl aloft to the men on the royal-yards to make all
+fast again. Then it was clewlines and buntlines and lowering of yards
+as the topgallant-sails were stripped off. The crojack was taken in,
+and some of the outer fore-and-aft handsails, whose order of names I
+can never remember.
+
+A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear sky.
+I could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased. The Samurai had been
+mistaken. And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked topgallant-
+and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might well be
+carrying sail. I was quite convinced that the Plate had fooled Captain
+West. So was Miss West convinced, and, being a favoured person like
+myself, she frankly told me so.
+
+“Father will be setting sail in half an hour,” she prophesied.
+
+What superior weather-sense Captain West possesses I know not, save
+that it is his by Samurai right. The sky, as I have said, was clear.
+The air was brittle—sparkling gloriously in the windy sun. And yet,
+behold, in a brief quarter of an hour, the change that took place. I
+had just returned from a trip below, and Miss West was venting her
+scorn on the River Plate and promising to go below to the
+sewing-machine, when we heard Mr. Pike groan. It was a whimsical groan
+of disgust, contrition, and acknowledgment of inferiority before the
+master.
+
+“Here comes the whole River Plate,” was what he groaned.
+
+Following his gaze to the south-west, we saw it coming. It was a
+cloud-mass that blotted out the sunlight and the day. It seemed to
+swell and belch and roll over and over on itself as it advanced with a
+rapidity that told of enormous wind behind it and in it. Its speed was
+headlong, terrific; and, beneath it, covering the sea, advancing with
+it, was a gray bank of mist.
+
+Captain West spoke to the mate, who bawled the order along, and the
+watch, reinforced by the watch below, began clewing up the mainsail and
+foresail and climbing into the rigging.
+
+“Keep off! Put your wheel over! Hard over!” Captain West called gently
+to the helmsman.
+
+And the big wheel spun around, and the _Elsinore’s_ bow fell off so
+that she might not be caught aback by the onslaught of wind.
+
+Thunder rode in that rushing, rolling blackness of cloud; and it was
+rent by lightning as it fell upon us.
+
+Then it was rain, wind, obscureness of gloom, and lightning. I caught a
+glimpse of the men on the lower-yards as they were blotted from view
+and as the _Elsinore_ heeled over and down. There were fifteen men of
+them to each yard, and the gaskets were well passed ere we were struck.
+How they regained the deck I do not know, I never saw; for the
+_Elsinore_, under only upper- and lower-topsails, lay down on her side,
+her port-rail buried in the sea, and did not rise.
+
+There was no maintaining an unsupported upright position on that acute
+slant of deck. Everybody held on. Mr. Pike frankly gripped the
+poop-rail with both hands, and Miss West and I made frantic clutches
+and scrambled for footing. But I noticed that the Samurai, poised
+lightly, like a bird on the verge of flight, merely rested one hand on
+the rail. He gave no orders. As I divined, there was nothing to be
+done. He waited—that was all—in tranquillity and repose. The situation
+was simple. Either the masts would go, or the _Elsinore_ would rise
+with her masts intact, or she would never rise again.
+
+In the meantime she lay dead, her lee yardarms almost touching the sea,
+the sea creaming solidly to her hatch-combings across the buried,
+unseen rail.
+
+The minutes were as centuries, until the bow paid off and the
+_Elsinore_, turned tail before it, righted to an even keel. Immediately
+this was accomplished Captain West had her brought back upon the wind.
+And immediately, thereupon, the big foresail went adrift from its
+gaskets. The shock, or succession of shocks, to the ship, from the
+tremendous buffeting that followed, was fearful. It seemed she was
+being racked to pieces. Master and mate were side by side when this
+happened, and the expressions on their faces typified them. In neither
+face was apprehension. Mr. Pike’s face bore a sour sneer for the
+worthless sailors who had botched the job. Captain West’s face was
+serenely considerative.
+
+Still, nothing was to be done, could be done; and for five minutes the
+_Elsinore_ was shaken as in the maw of some gigantic monster, until the
+last shreds of the great piece of canvas had been torn away.
+
+“Our foresail has departed for Africa,” Miss West laughed in my ear.
+
+She is like her father, unaware of fear.
+
+“And now we may as well go below and be comfortable,” she said five
+minutes later. “The worst is over. It will only be blow, blow, blow,
+and a big sea making.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+All day it blew. And the big sea that arose made the _Elsinore’s_
+conduct almost unlivable. My only comfort was achieved by taking to my
+bunk and wedging myself with pillows buttressed against the bunk’s
+sides by empty soap-boxes which Wada arranged. Mr. Pike, clinging to my
+door-casing while his legs sprawled adrift in a succession of terrific
+rolls, paused to tell me that it was a new one on him in the pampero
+line. It was all wrong from the first. It had not come on right. It had
+no reason to be.
+
+He paused a little longer, and, in a casual way, that under the
+circumstances was ridiculously transparent, exposed what was at ferment
+in his mind.
+
+First of all he was absurd enough to ask if Possum showed symptoms of
+sea-sickness. Next, he unburdened his wrath for the inefficients who
+had lost the foresail, and sympathized with the sail-makers for the
+extra work thrown upon them. Then he asked permission to borrow one of
+my books, and, clinging to my bunk, selected Buchner’s _Force and
+Matter_ from my shelf, carefully wedging the empty space with the
+doubled magazine I use for that purpose.
+
+Still he was loth to depart, and, cudgelling his brains for a pretext,
+he set up a rambling discourse on River Plate weather. And all the time
+I kept wondering what was behind it all. At last it came.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Pathurst,” he remarked, “do you happen to remember how
+many years ago Mr. Mellaire said it was that he was dismasted and
+foundered off here?”
+
+I caught his drift on the instant.
+
+“Eight years ago, wasn’t it?” I lied.
+
+Mr. Pike let this sink in and slowly digested it, while the _Elsinore_
+was guilty of three huge rolls down to port and back again.
+
+“Now I wonder what ship was sunk off the Plate eight years ago?” he
+communed, as if with himself. “I guess I’ll have to ask Mr. Mellaire
+her name. You can search me for all any I can recollect.”
+
+He thanked me with unwonted elaborateness for _Force and Matter_, of
+which I knew he would never read a line, and felt his way to the door.
+Here he hung on for a moment, as if struck by a new and most accidental
+idea.
+
+“Now it wasn’t, by any chance, that he said eighteen years ago?” he
+queried.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Eight years ago,” I said. “That’s the way I remember it, though why I
+should remember it at all I don’t know. But that is what he said,” I
+went on with increasing confidence. “Eight years ago. I am sure of it.”
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me ponderingly, and waited until the _Elsinore_ had
+fairly righted for an instant ere he took his departure down the hall.
+
+I think I have followed the working of his mind. I have long since
+learned that his memory of ships, officers, cargoes, gales, and
+disasters is remarkable. He is a veritable encyclopædia of the sea.
+Also, it is patent that he has equipped himself with Sidney Waltham’s
+history. As yet, he does not dream that Mr. Mellaire is Sidney Waltham,
+and he is merely wondering if Mr. Mellaire was a ship-mate of Sidney
+Waltham eighteen years ago in the ship lost off the Plate.
+
+In the meantime, I shall never forgive Mr. Mellaire for this slip he
+has made. He should have been more careful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+
+An abominable night! A wonderful night! Sleep? I suppose I did sleep,
+in catnaps, but I swear I heard every bell struck until three-thirty.
+Then came a change, an easement. No longer was it a stubborn, loggy
+fight against pressures. The _Elsinore_ moved. I could feel her slip,
+and slide, and send, and soar. Whereas before she had been flung
+continually down to port, she now rolled as far to one side as to the
+other.
+
+I knew what had taken place. Instead of remaining hove-to on the
+pampero, Captain West had turned tail and was running before it. This,
+I understood, meant a really serious storm, for the north-east was the
+last direction in which Captain West desired to go. But at any rate the
+movement, though wilder, was easier, and I slept. I was awakened at
+five by the thunder of seas that fell aboard, rushed down the main
+deck, and crashed against the cabin wall. Through my open door I could
+see water swashing up and down the hall, while half a foot of water
+creamed and curdled from under my bunk across the floor each time the
+ship rolled to starboard.
+
+The steward brought me my coffee, and, wedged by boxes and pillows,
+like an equilibrist, I sat up and drank it. Luckily I managed to finish
+it in time, for a succession of terrific rolls emptied one of my
+book-shelves. Possum, crawling upward from my feet under the covered
+way of my bed, yapped with terror as the seas smashed and thundered and
+as the avalanche of books descended upon us. And I could not but grin
+when the _Paste Board Crown_ smote me on the head, while the puppy was
+knocked gasping with Chesterton’s _What’s Wrong with the World_?
+
+“Well, what do you think?” I queried of the steward who was helping to
+set us and the books to rights.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his bright slant eyes were very bright
+as he replied:
+
+“Many times I see like this. Me old man. Many times I see more bad. Too
+much wind, too much work. Rotten dam bad.”
+
+I could guess that the scene on deck was a spectacle, and at six
+o’clock, as gray light showed through my ports in the intervals when
+they were not submerged, I essayed the side-board of my bunk like a
+gymnast, captured my careering slippers, and shuddered as I thrust my
+bare feet into their chill sogginess. I did not wait to dress. Merely
+in pyjamas I headed for the poop, Possum wailing dismally at my
+desertion.
+
+It was a feat to travel the narrow halls. Time and again I paused and
+held on until my finger-tips hurt. In the moments of easement I made
+progress. Yet I miscalculated. The foot of the broad stairway to the
+chart-house rested on a cross-hall a dozen feet in length.
+Over-confidence and an unusually violent antic of the _Elsinore_ caused
+the disaster. She flung down to starboard with such suddenness and at
+such a pitch that the flooring seemed to go out from under me and I
+hustled helplessly down the incline. I missed a frantic clutch at the
+newel-post, flung up my arm in time to save my face, and, most
+fortunately, whirled half about, and, still falling, impacted with my
+shoulder muscle-pad on Captain West’s door.
+
+Youth will have its way. So will a ship in a sea. And so will a hundred
+and seventy pounds of a man. The beautiful hardwood door-panel
+splintered, the latch fetched away, and I broke the nails of the four
+fingers of my right hand in a futile grab at the flying door, marring
+the polished surface with four parallel scratches. I kept right on,
+erupting into Captain West’s spacious room with the big brass bed.
+
+Miss West, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown, her eyes heavy still
+with sleep, her hair glorious and for the once ungroomed, clinging in
+the doorway that gave entrance on the main cabin, met my startled gaze
+with an equally startled gaze.
+
+It was no time for apologies. I kept right on my mad way, caught the
+foot stanchion, and was whipped around in half a circle flat upon
+Captain West’s brass bed.
+
+Miss West was beginning to laugh.
+
+“Come right in,” she gurgled.
+
+A score of retorts, all deliciously inadvisable, tickled my tongue, so
+I said nothing, contenting myself with holding on with my left hand
+while I nursed my stinging right hand under my arm-pit. Beyond her,
+across the floor of the main cabin, I saw the steward in pursuit of
+Captain West’s Bible and a sheaf of Miss West’s music. And as she
+gurgled and laughed at me, beholding her in this intimacy of storm, the
+thought flashed through my brain:
+
+_She is a woman_. _She is desirable_.
+
+Now did she sense this fleeting, unuttered flash of mine? I know not,
+save that her laughter left her, and long conventional training
+asserted itself as she said:
+
+“I just knew everything was adrift in father’s room. He hasn’t been in
+it all night. I could hear things rolling around . . . What is wrong?
+Are you hurt?”
+
+“Stubbed my fingers, that’s all,” I answered, looking at my broken
+nails and standing gingerly upright.
+
+“My, that _was_ a roll,” she sympathized.
+
+“Yes; I’d started to go upstairs,” I said, “and not to turn into your
+father’s bed. I’m afraid I’ve ruined the door.”
+
+Came another series of great rolls. I sat down on the bed and held on.
+Miss West, secure in the doorway, began gurgling again, while beyond,
+across the cabin carpet, the steward shot past, embracing a small
+writing-desk that had evidently carried away from its fastenings when
+he seized hold of it for support. More seas smashed and crashed against
+the for’ard wall of the cabin; and the steward, failing of lodgment,
+shot back across the carpet, still holding the desk from harm.
+
+Taking advantage of favouring spells, I managed to effect my exit and
+gain the newel-post ere the next series of rolls came. And as I clung
+on and waited, I could not forget what I had just seen. Vividly under
+my eyelids burned the picture of Miss West’s sleep-laden eyes, her
+hair, and all the softness of her. _A woman and desirable_ kept
+drumming in my brain.
+
+But I forgot all this, when, nearly at the top, I was thrown up the
+hill of the stairs as if it had suddenly become downhill. My feet flew
+from stair to stair to escape falling, and I flew, or fell, apparently
+upward, until, at the top, I hung on for dear life while the stern of
+the _Elsinore_ flung skyward on some mighty surge.
+
+Such antics of so huge a ship! The old stereotyped “toy” describes her;
+for toy she was, the sheerest splinter of a plaything in the grip of
+the elements. And yet, despite this overwhelming sensation of
+microscopic helplessness, I was aware of a sense of surety. There was
+the Samurai. Informed with his will and wisdom, the _Elsinore_ was no
+cat’s-paw. Everything was ordered, controlled. She was doing what he
+ordained her to do, and, no matter what storm-Titans bellowed about her
+and buffeted her, she would continue to do what he ordained her to do.
+
+I glanced into the chart-room. There he sat, leaned back in a
+screw-chair, his sea-booted legs, wedged against the settee, holding
+him in place in the most violent rolls. His black oilskin coat
+glistened in the lamplight with a myriad drops of ocean that advertised
+a recent return from deck. His sou’wester, black and glistening, was
+like the helmet of some legendary hero. He was smoking a cigar, and he
+smiled and greeted me. But he seemed very tired and very old—old with
+wisdom, however, not weakness. The flesh of his face, the pink pigment
+quite washed and worn away, was more transparent than ever; and yet
+never was he more serene, never more the master absolute of our tiny,
+fragile world. The age that showed in him was not a matter of
+terrestrial years. It was ageless, passionless, beyond human. Never had
+he appeared so great to me, so far remote, so much a spirit visitant.
+
+And he cautioned and advised me, in silver-mellow beneficent voice, as
+I essayed the venture of opening the chart-house door to gain outside.
+He knew the moment, although I never could have guessed it for myself,
+and gave the word that enabled me to win the poop.
+
+Water was everywhere. The _Elsinore_ was rushing through a blurring
+whirr of water. Seas creamed and licked the poop-deck edge, now to
+starboard, now to port. High in the air, over-towering and perilously
+down-toppling, following-seas pursued our stern. The air was filled
+with spindrift like a fog or spray. No officer of the watch was in
+sight. The poop was deserted, save for two helmsmen in streaming
+oilskins under the half-shelter of the open wheel-house. I nodded good
+morning to them.
+
+One was Tom Spink, the elderly but keen and dependable English sailor.
+The other was Bill Quigley, one of a forecastle group of three that
+herded uniquely together, though the other two, Frank Fitzgibbon and
+Richard Giller, were in the second mate’s watch. The three had proved
+handy with their fists, and clannish; they had fought pitched
+forecastle battles with the gangster clique and won a sort of
+neutrality of independence for themselves. They were not exactly
+sailors—Mr. Mellaire sneeringly called them the “bricklayers”—but they
+had successfully refused subservience to the gangster crowd.
+
+To cross the deck from the chart-house to the break of the poop was no
+slight feat, but I managed it and hung on to the railing while the wind
+stung my flesh with the flappings of my pyjamas. At this moment, and
+for the moment, the _Elsinore_ righted to an even keel, and dashed
+along and down the avalanching face of a wave. And as she thus righted
+her deck was filled with water level from rail to rail. Above this
+flood, or knee-deep in it, Mr. Pike and half-a-dozen sailors were
+bunched on the fife-rail of the mizzen-mast. The carpenter, too, was
+there, with a couple of assistants.
+
+The next roll spilled half a thousand tons of water outboard sheer over
+the starboard-rail, while all the starboard ports opened automatically
+and gushed huge streams. Then came the opposite roll to port, with a
+clanging shut of the iron doors; and a hundred tons of sea sloshed
+outboard across the port-rail, while all the iron doors on that side
+opened wide and gushed. And all this time, it must not be forgotten,
+the _Elsinore_ was dashing ahead through the sea.
+
+The only sail she carried was three upper-topsails. Not the tiniest
+triangle of headsail was on her. I had never seen her with so little
+wind-surface, and the three narrow strips of canvas, bellied to the
+seemingness of sheet-iron with the pressure of the wind, drove her
+before the gale at astonishing speed.
+
+As the water on the deck subsided the men on the fife-rail left their
+refuge. One group, led by the redoubtable Mr. Pike, strove to capture a
+mass of planks and twisted steel. For the moment I did not recognize
+what it was. The carpenter, with two men, sprang upon Number Three
+hatch and worked hurriedly and fearfully. And I knew why Captain West
+had turned tail to the storm. Number Three hatch was a wreck. Among
+other things the great timber, called the “strong-back,” was broken. He
+had had to run, or founder. Before our decks were swept again I could
+make out the carpenter’s emergency repairs. With fresh timbers he was
+bolting, lashing, and wedging Number Three hatch into some sort of
+tightness.
+
+When the _Elsinore_ dipped her port-rail under and scooped several
+hundred tons of South Atlantic, and then, immediately rolling her
+starboard-rail under, had another hundred tons of breaking sea fall in
+board upon her, all the men forsook everything and scrambled for life
+upon the fife-rail. In the bursting spray they were quite hidden; and
+then I saw them and counted them all as they emerged into view. Again
+they waited for the water to subside.
+
+The mass of wreckage pursued by Mr. Pike and his men ground a hundred
+feet along the deck for’ard, and, as the _Elsinore’s_ stern sank down
+in some abyss, ground back again and smashed up against the cabin wall.
+I identified this stuff as part of the bridge. That portion which
+spanned from the mizzen-mast to the ’midship-house was missing, while
+the starboard boat on the ’midship-house was a splintered mess.
+
+Watching the struggle to capture and subdue the section of bridge, I
+was reminded of Victor Hugo’s splendid description of the sailor’s
+battle with a ship’s gun gone adrift in a night of storm. But there was
+a difference, I found that Hugo’s narrative had stirred me more
+profoundly than was I stirred by this actual struggle before my eyes.
+
+I have repeatedly said that the sea makes one hard. I now realized how
+hard I had become as I stood there at the break of the poop in my
+wind-whipped, spray-soaked pyjamas. I felt no solicitude for the
+forecastle humans who struggled in peril of their lives beneath me.
+They did not count. Ah—I was even curious to see what might happen, did
+they get caught by those crashing avalanches of sea ere they could gain
+the safety of the fife-rail.
+
+And I saw. Mr. Pike, in the lead, of course, up to his waist in rushing
+water, dashed in, caught the flying wreckage with a turn of rope, and
+fetched it up short with a turn around one of the port mizzen-shrouds.
+The _Elsinore_ flung down to port, and a solid wall of down-toppling
+green upreared a dozen feet above the rail. The men fled to the
+fife-rail. But Mr. Pike, holding his turn, held on, looked squarely
+into the wall of the wave, and received the downfall. He emerged, still
+holding by the turn the captured bridge.
+
+The feeble-minded faun (the stone-deaf man) led the way to Mr. Pike’s
+assistance, followed by Tony, the suicidal Greek. Paddy was next, and
+in order came Shorty, Henry the training-ship boy, and Nancy, last, of
+course, and looking as if he were going to execution.
+
+The deck-water was no more than knee-deep, though rushing with
+torrential force, when Mr. Pike and the six men lifted the section of
+bridge and started for’ard with it. They swayed and staggered, but
+managed to keep going.
+
+The carpenter saw the impending ocean-mountain first. I saw him cry to
+his own men and then to Mr. Pike ere he fled to the fife-rail. But Mr.
+Pike’s men had no chance. Abreast of the ’midship-house, on the
+starboard side, fully fifteen feet above the rail and twenty above the
+deck, the sea fell on board. The top of the ’midship-house was swept
+clean of the splintered boat. The water, impacting against the side of
+the house, spouted skyward as high as the crojack-yard. And all this,
+in addition to the main bulk of the wave, swept and descended upon Mr.
+Pike and his men.
+
+They disappeared. The bridge disappeared. The _Elsinore_ rolled to port
+and dipped her deck full from rail to rail. Next, she plunged down by
+the head, and all this mass of water surged forward. Through the
+creaming, foaming surface now and then emerged an arm, or a head, or a
+back, while cruel edges of jagged plank and twisted steel rods
+advertised that the bridge was turning over and over. I wondered what
+men were beneath it and what mauling they were receiving.
+
+And yet these men did not count. I was aware of anxiety only for Mr.
+Pike. He, in a way, socially, was of my caste and class. He and I
+belonged aft in the high place; ate at the same table. I was acutely
+desirous that he should not be hurt or killed. The rest did not matter.
+They were not of my world. I imagine the old-time skippers, on the
+middle passage, felt much the same toward their slave-cargoes in the
+fetid ’tween decks.
+
+The _Elsinore’s_ bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming
+valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward
+me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious,
+incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright,
+dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and
+the Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a
+man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the
+teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a
+half-drowned slave in either hand.
+
+I knew augustness and pride as I gazed—pride that my eyes were blue,
+like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with
+him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command.
+I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that
+tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the
+rest—the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the
+half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered
+races—how could they count? My heels were iron as I gazed on them in
+their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten thousand generations and
+centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil
+of our will.
+
+Again the _Elsinore_ rolled to starboard and to port, while the spume
+spouted to our lower-yards and a thousand tons of South Atlantic surged
+across from rail to rail. And again all were down and under, with
+jagged plank and twisted steel overriding them. And again that amazing
+blond-skinned giant emerged, on his two legs upstanding, a broken waif
+like a rat in either hand. He forced his way through rushing,
+waist-high water, deposited his burdens with the carpenter on the
+fife-rail, and returned to drag Larry reeling to his feet and help him
+to the fife-rail. Out of the wash, Tony, the Greek, crawled on hands
+and knees and sank down helplessly at the fife-rail. There was nothing
+suicidal now in his mood. Struggle as he would, he could not lift
+himself until the mate, gripping his oilskin at the collar, with one
+hand flung him through the air into the carpenter’s arms.
+
+Next came Shorty, his face streaming blood, one arm hanging useless,
+his sea-boots stripped from him. Mr. Pike pitched him into the
+fife-rail, and returned for the last man. It was Henry, the
+training-ship boy. Him I had seen, unstruggling, motionless, show at
+the surface like a drowned man and sink again as the flood surged aft
+and smashed him against the cabin. Mr. Pike, shoulder-deep, twice
+beaten to his knees and under by bursting seas, caught the lad,
+shouldered him, and carried him away for’ard.
+
+An hour later, in the cabin, I encountered Mr. Pike going into
+breakfast. He had changed his clothes, and he had shaved! Now how could
+one treat a hero such as he save as I treated him when I remarked
+off-handedly that he must have had a lively watch?
+
+“My,” he answered, equally off-handedly, “I did get a prime soaking.”
+
+That was all. He had had no time to see me at the poop-rail. It was
+merely the day’s work, the ship’s work, the MAN’S work—all capitals, if
+you please, in MAN. I was the only one aft who knew, and I knew because
+I had chanced to see. Had I not been on the poop at that early hour no
+one aft ever would have known those gray, storm-morning deeds of his.
+
+“Anybody hurt?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, some of the men got wet. But no bones broke. Henry’ll be laid off
+for a day. He got turned over in a sea and bashed his head. And
+Shorty’s got a wrenched shoulder, I think.—But, say, we got Davis into
+the top bunk! The seas filled him full and he had to climb for it. He’s
+all awash and wet now, and you oughta seen me praying for more.” He
+paused and sighed. “I’m getting old, I guess. I oughta wring his neck,
+but somehow I ain’t got the gumption. Just the same, he’ll be overside
+before we get in.”
+
+“A month’s wages against a pound of tobacco he won’t,” I challenged.
+
+“No,” said Mr. Pike slowly. “But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll bet
+you a pound of tobacco even, or a month’s wages even, that I’ll have
+the pleasure of putting a sack of coal to his feet that never will come
+off.”
+
+“Done,” said I.
+
+“Done,” said Mr. Pike. “And now I guess I’ll get a bite to eat.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+The more I see of Miss West the more she pleases me. Explain it in
+terms of propinquity, or isolation, or whatever you will; I, at least,
+do not attempt explanation. I know only that she is a woman and
+desirable. And I am rather proud, in a way, to find that I am just a
+man like any man. The midnight oil, and the relentless pursuit I have
+endured in the past from the whole tribe of women, have not, I am glad
+to say, utterly spoiled me.
+
+I am obsessed by that phrase—a _woman and desirable_. It beats in my
+brain, in my thought. I go out of my way to steal a glimpse of Miss
+West through a cabin door or vista of hall when she does not know I am
+looking. A woman is a wonderful thing. A woman’s hair is wonderful. A
+woman’s softness is a magic.—Oh, I know them for what they are, and yet
+this very knowledge makes them only the more wonderful. I know—I would
+stake my soul—that Miss West has considered me as a mate a thousand
+times to once that I have so considered her. And yet—she is a woman and
+desirable.
+
+And I find myself continually reminded of Richard Le Gallienne’s
+inimitable quatrain:
+
+“Were I a woman, I would all day long
+Sing my own beauty in some holy song,
+Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid,
+And say ‘I am a woman’ all day long.”
+
+
+Let me advise all philosophers suffering from world-sickness to take a
+long sea voyage with a woman like Miss West.
+
+In this narrative I shall call her “Miss West” no more. She has ceased
+to be Miss West. She is Margaret. I do not think of her as Miss West. I
+think of her as Margaret. It is a pretty word, a woman-word. What poet
+must have created it! Margaret! I never tire of it. My tongue is
+enamoured of it. Margaret West! What a name to conjure with! A name
+provocative of dreams and mighty connotations. The history of our
+westward-faring race is written in it. There is pride in it, and
+dominion, and adventure, and conquest. When I murmur it I see visions
+of lean, beaked ships, of winged helmets, and heels iron-shod of
+restless men, royal lovers, royal adventurers, royal fighters. Yes, and
+even now, in these latter days when the sun consumes us, still we sit
+in the high seat of government and command.
+
+Oh—and by the way—she is twenty-four years old. I asked Mr. Pike the
+date of the _Dixie’s_ collision with the river steamer in San Francisco
+Bay. This occurred in 1901. Margaret was twelve years old at the time.
+This is 1913. Blessings on the head of the man who invented arithmetic!
+She is twenty-four. Her name is Margaret, and she is desirable.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+There are so many things to tell about. Where and how this mad voyage,
+with a mad crew, will end is beyond all surmise. But the _Elsinore_
+drives on, and day by day her history is bloodily written. And while
+murder is done, and while the whole floating drama moves toward the
+bleak southern ocean and the icy blasts of Cape Horn, I sit in the high
+place with the masters, unafraid, I am proud to say, in an ecstasy, I
+am proud to say, and I murmur over and over to _myself_—_Margaret_, _a
+woman_; _Margaret_, _and desirable_.
+
+But to resume. It is the first day of June. Ten days have passed since
+the pampero. When the strong back on Number Three hatch was repaired
+Captain West came back on the wind, hove to, and rode out the gale.
+Since then, in calm, and fog, and damp, and storm, we have won south
+until to-day we are almost abreast of the Falklands. The coast of the
+Argentine lies to the West, below the sea-line, and some time this
+morning we crossed the fiftieth parallel of south latitude. Here begins
+the passage of Cape Horn, for so it is reckoned by the navigators—fifty
+south in the Atlantic to fifty south in the Pacific.
+
+And yet all is well with us in the matter of weather. The _Elsinore_
+slides along with favouring winds. Daily it grows colder. The great
+cabin stove roars and is white-hot, and all the connecting doors are
+open, so that the whole after region of the ship is warm and
+comfortable. But on the deck the air bites, and Margaret and I wear
+mittens as we promenade the poop or go for’ard along the repaired
+bridge to see the chickens on the ’midship-house. The poor, wretched
+creatures of instinct and climate! Behold, as they approach the
+southern mid-winter of the Horn, when they have need of all their
+feathers, they proceed to moult, because, forsooth, this is the summer
+time in the land they came from. Or is moulting determined by the time
+of year they happen to be born? I shall have to look into this.
+Margaret will know.
+
+Yesterday ominous preparations were made for the passage of the Horn.
+All the braces were taken from the main deck pin-rails and geared and
+arranged so that they may be worked from the tops of the houses.
+
+Thus, the fore-braces run to the top of the forecastle, the main-braces
+to the top of the ’midship-house, and the mizzen-braces to the poop. It
+is evident that they expect our main deck frequently to be filled with
+water. So evident is it that a laden ship when in big seas is like a
+log awash, that fore and aft, on both sides, along the deck,
+shoulder-high, life-lines have been rigged. Also, the two iron doors,
+on port and starboard, that open from the cabin directly upon the main
+deck, have been barricaded and caulked. Not until we are in the Pacific
+and flying north will these doors open again.
+
+And while we prepare to battle around the stormiest headland in the
+world our situation on board grows darker. This morning Petro
+Marinkovich, a sailor in Mr. Mellaire’s watch, was found dead on Number
+One hatch. The body bore several knife-wounds and the throat was cut.
+It was palpably done by some one or several of the forecastle hands;
+but not a word can be elicited. Those who are guilty of it are silent,
+of course; while others who may chance to know are afraid to speak.
+
+Before midday the body was overside with the customary sack of coal.
+Already the man is a past episode. But the humans for’ard are tense
+with expectancy of what is to come. I strolled for’ard this afternoon,
+and noted for the first time a distinct hostility toward me. They
+recognize that I belong with the after-guard in the high place. Oh,
+nothing was said; but it was patent by the way almost every man looked
+at me, or refused to look at me. Only Mulligan Jacobs and Charles Davis
+were outspoken.
+
+“Good riddance,” said Mulligan Jacobs. “The Guinea didn’t have the
+spunk of a louse. And he’s better off, ain’t he? He lived dirty, an’ he
+died dirty, an’ now he’s over an’ done with the whole dirty game.
+There’s men on board that oughta wish they was as lucky as him. Theirs
+is still a-coming to ’em.”
+
+“You mean . . . ?” I queried.
+
+“Whatever you want to think I mean,” the twisted wretch grinned
+malevolently into my face.
+
+Charles Davis, when I peeped into his iron room, was exuberant.
+
+“A pretty tale for the court in Seattle,” he exulted. “It’ll only make
+my case that much stronger. And wait till the reporters get hold of it!
+The hell-ship _Elsinore_! They’ll have pretty pickin’s!”
+
+“I haven’t seen any hell-ship,” I said coldly.
+
+“You’ve seen my treatment, ain’t you?” he retorted. “You’ve seen the
+hell I’ve got, ain’t you?”
+
+“I know you for a cold-blooded murderer,” I answered.
+
+“The court will determine that, sir. All you’ll have to do is to
+testify to facts.”
+
+“I’ll testify that had I been in the mate’s place I’d have hanged you
+for murder.”
+
+His eyes positively sparkled.
+
+“I’ll ask you to remember this conversation when you’re under oath,
+sir,” he cried eagerly.
+
+I confess the man aroused in me a reluctant admiration. I looked about
+his mean, iron-walled room. During the pampero the place had been
+awash. The white paint was peeling off in huge scabs, and iron-rust was
+everywhere. The floor was filthy. The place stank with the stench of
+his sickness. His pannikin and unwashed eating-gear from the last meal
+were scattered on the floor: His blankets were wet, his clothing was
+wet. In a corner was a heterogeneous mass of soggy, dirty garments. He
+lay in the very bunk in which he had brained O’Sullivan. He had been
+months in this vile hole. In order to live he would have to remain
+months more in it. And while his rat-like vitality won my admiration, I
+loathed and detested him in very nausea.
+
+“Aren’t you afraid?” I demanded. “What makes you think you will last
+the voyage? Don’t you know bets are being made that you won’t?”
+
+So interested was he that he seemed to prick up his ears as he raised
+on his elbow.
+
+“I suppose you’re too scared to tell me about them bets,” he sneered.
+
+“Oh, I’ve bet you’ll last,” I assured him.
+
+“That means there’s others that bet I won’t,” he rattled on hastily.
+“An’ that means that there’s men aboard the _Elsinore_ right now
+financially interested in my taking-off.”
+
+At this moment the steward, bound aft from the galley, paused in the
+doorway and listened, grinning. As for Charles Davis, the man had
+missed his vocation. He should have been a land-lawyer, not a
+sea-lawyer.
+
+“Very well, sir,” he went on. “I’ll have you testify to that in
+Seattle, unless you’re lying to a helpless sick man, or unless you’ll
+perjure yourself under oath.”
+
+He got what he was seeking, for he stung me to retort:
+
+“Oh, I’ll testify. Though I tell you candidly that I don’t think I’ll
+win my bet.”
+
+“You loose ’m bet sure,” the steward broke in, nodding his head. “That
+fellow him die damn soon.”
+
+“Bet with’m, sir,” Davis challenged me. “It’s a straight tip from me,
+an’ a regular cinch.”
+
+The whole situation was so gruesome and grotesque, and I had been swept
+into it so absurdly, that for the moment I did not know what to do or
+say.
+
+“It’s good money,” Davis urged. “I ain’t goin’ to die. Look here,
+steward, how much you want to bet?”
+
+“Five dollar, ten dollar, twenty dollar,” the steward answered, with a
+shoulder-shrug that meant that the sum was immaterial.
+
+“Very well then, steward. Mr. Pathurst covers your money, say for
+twenty. Is it a go, sir?”
+
+“Why don’t you bet with him yourself?” I demanded.
+
+“Sure I will, sir. Here, you steward, I bet you twenty even I don’t
+die.”
+
+The steward shook his head.
+
+“I bet you twenty to ten,” the sick man insisted. “What’s eatin’ you,
+anyway?”
+
+“You live, me lose, me pay you,” the steward explained. “You die, I
+win, you dead; no pay me.”
+
+Still grinning and shaking his head, he went his way.
+
+“Just the same, sir, it’ll be rich testimony,” Davis chuckled. “An’
+can’t you see the reporters eatin’ it up?”
+
+The Asiatic clique in the cook’s room has its suspicions about the
+death of Marinkovich, but will not voice them. Beyond shakings of heads
+and dark mutterings, I can get nothing out of Wada or the steward. When
+I talked with the sail-maker, he complained that his injured hand was
+hurting him and that he would be glad when he could get to the surgeons
+in Seattle. As for the murder, when pressed by me, he gave me to
+understand that it was no affair of the Japanese or Chinese on board,
+and that he was a Japanese.
+
+But Louis, the Chinese half-caste with the Oxford accent, was more
+frank. I caught him aft from the galley on a trip to the lazarette for
+provisions.
+
+“We are of a different race, sir, from these men,” he said; “and our
+safest policy is to leave them alone. We have talked it over, and we
+have nothing to say, sir, nothing whatever to say. Consider my
+position. I work for’ard in the galley; I am in constant contact with
+the sailors; I even sleep in their section of the ship; and I am one
+man against many. The only other countryman I have on board is the
+steward, and he sleeps aft. Your servant and the two sail-makers are
+Japanese. They are only remotely kin to us, though we’ve agreed to
+stand together and apart from whatever happens.”
+
+“There is Shorty,” I said, remembering Mr. Pike’s diagnosis of his
+mixed nationality.
+
+“But we do not recognize him, sir,” Louis answered suavely. “He is
+Portuguese; he is Malay; he is Japanese, true; but he is a mongrel,
+sir, a mongrel and a bastard. Also, he is a fool. And please, sir,
+remember that we are very few, and that our position compels us to
+neutrality.”
+
+“But your outlook is gloomy,” I persisted. “How do you think it will
+end?”
+
+“We shall arrive in Seattle most probably, some of us. But I can tell
+you this, sir: I have lived a long life on the sea, but I have never
+seen a crew like this. There are few sailors in it; there are bad men
+in it; and the rest are fools and worse. You will notice I mention no
+names, sir; but there are men on board whom I do not care to
+antagonize. I am just Louis, the cook. I do my work to the best of my
+ability, and that is all, sir.”
+
+“And will Charles Davis arrive in Seattle?” I asked, changing the topic
+in acknowledgment of his right to be reticent.
+
+“No, I do not think so, sir,” he answered, although his eyes thanked me
+for my courtesy. “The steward tells me you have bet that he will. I
+think, sir, it is a poor bet. We are about to go around the Horn. I
+have been around it many times. This is midwinter, and we are going
+from east to west. Davis’ room will be awash for weeks. It will never
+be dry. A strong healthy man confined in it could well die of the
+hardship. And Davis is far from well. In short, sir, I know his
+condition, and he is in a shocking state. Surgeons might prolong his
+life, but here in a wind-jammer it is shortened very rapidly. I have
+seen many men die at sea. I know, sir. Thank you, sir.”
+
+And the Eurasian Chinese-Englishman bowed himself away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+
+Things are worse than I fancied. Here are two episodes within the last
+seventy-two hours. Mr. Mellaire, for instance, is going to pieces. He
+cannot stand the strain of being on the same vessel with the man who
+has sworn to avenge Captain Somers’s murder, especially when that man
+is the redoubtable Mr. Pike.
+
+For several days Margaret and I have been remarking the second mate’s
+bloodshot eyes and pain-lined face and wondering if he were sick. And
+to-day the secret leaked out. Wada does not like Mr. Mellaire, and this
+morning, when he brought me breakfast, I saw by the wicked, gleeful
+gleam in his almond eyes that he was spilling over with some fresh,
+delectable ship’s gossip.
+
+For several days, I learned, he and the steward have been solving a
+cabin mystery. A gallon can of wood alcohol, standing on a shelf in the
+after-room, had lost quite a portion of its contents. They compared
+notes and then made of themselves a Sherlock Holmes and a Doctor
+Watson. First, they gauged the daily diminution of alcohol. Next they
+gauged it several times daily, and learned that the diminution,
+whenever it occurred, was first apparent immediately after meal-time.
+This focussed their attention on two suspects—the second mate and the
+carpenter, who alone sat in the after-room. The rest was easy. Whenever
+Mr. Mellaire arrived ahead of the carpenter more alcohol was missing.
+When they arrived and departed together, the alcohol was undisturbed.
+The carpenter was never alone in the room. The syllogism was complete.
+And now the steward stores the alcohol under his bunk.
+
+But wood alcohol is deadly poison. What a constitution this man of
+fifty must have! Small wonder his eyes have been bloodshot. The great
+wonder is that the stuff did not destroy him.
+
+I have not whispered a word of this to Margaret; nor shall I whisper
+it. I should like to put Mr. Pike on his guard; and yet I know that the
+revealing of Mr. Mellaire’s identity would precipitate another killing.
+And still we drive south, close-hauled on the wind, toward the
+inhospitable tip of the continent. To-day we are south of a line drawn
+between the Straits of Magellan and the Falklands, and to-morrow, if
+the breeze holds, we shall pick up the coast of Tierra del Fuego close
+to the entrance of the Straits of Le Maire, through which Captain West
+intends to pass if the wind favours.
+
+The other episode occurred last night. Mr. Pike says nothing, yet he
+knows the crew situation. I have been watching some time now, ever
+since the death of Marinkovich; and I am certain that Mr. Pike never
+ventures on the main deck after dark. Yet he holds his tongue, confides
+in no man, and plays out the bitter perilous game as a commonplace
+matter of course and all in the day’s work.
+
+And now to the episode. Shortly after the close of the second dog-watch
+last evening I went for’ard to the chickens on the ’midship-house on an
+errand for Margaret. I was to make sure that the steward had carried
+out her orders. The canvas covering to the big chicken coop had to be
+down, the ventilation insured, and the kerosene stove burning properly.
+When I had proved to my satisfaction the dependableness of the steward,
+and just as I was on the verge of returning to the poop, I was drawn
+aside by the weird crying of penguins in the darkness and by the
+unmistakable noise of a whale blowing not far away.
+
+I had climbed around the end of the port boat, and was standing there,
+quite hidden in the darkness, when I heard the unmistakable age-lag
+step of the mate proceed along the bridge from the poop. It was a dim
+starry night, and the _Elsinore_, in the calm ocean under the lee of
+Tierra del Fuego, was slipping gently and prettily through the water at
+an eight-knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike paused at the for’ard end of the housetop and stood in a
+listening attitude. From the main deck below, near Number Two hatch,
+across the mumbling of various voices, I could recognize Kid Twist,
+Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine—the three gangsters. But Steve Roberts,
+the cow-boy, was also there, as was Mr. Mellaire, both of whom belonged
+in the other watch and should have been turned in; for, at midnight, it
+would be their watch on deck. Especially wrong was Mr. Mellaire’s
+presence, holding social converse with members of the crew—a breach of
+ship ethics most grievous.
+
+I have always been cursed with curiosity. Always have I wanted to know;
+and, on the _Elsinore_, I have already witnessed many a little scene
+that was a clean-cut dramatic gem. So I did not discover myself, but
+lurked behind the boat.
+
+Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The men still talked. I was
+tantalized by the crying of the penguins, and by the whale, evidently
+playful, which came so close that it spouted and splashed a
+biscuit-toss away. I saw Mr. Pike’s head turn at the sound; he glanced
+squarely in my direction, but did not see me. Then he returned to
+listening to the mumble of voices from beneath.
+
+Now whether Mulligan Jacobs just happened along, or whether he was
+deliberately scouting, I do not know. I tell what occurred. Up-and-down
+the side of the ’midship-house is a ladder. And up this ladder Mulligan
+Jacobs climbed so noiselessly that I was not aware of his presence
+until I heard Mr. Pike snarl:
+
+“What the hell you doin’ here?”
+
+Then I saw Mulligan Jacobs in the gloom, within two yards of the mate.
+
+“What’s it to you?” Mulligan Jacobs snarled back. The voices below
+hushed. I knew every man stood there tense and listening. No; the
+philosophers have not yet explained Mulligan Jacobs. There is something
+more to him than the last word has said in any book. He stood there in
+the darkness, a fragile creature with curvature of the spine, facing
+alone the first mate, and he was not afraid.
+
+Mr. Pike cursed him with fearful, unrepeatable words, and again
+demanded what he was doing there.
+
+“I left me plug of tobacco here when I was coiling down last,” said the
+little twisted man—no; he did not say it. He spat it out like so much
+venom.
+
+“Get off of here, or I’ll throw you off, you and your tobacco,” raged
+the mate.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs lurched closer to Mr. Pike, and in the gloom and with
+the roll of the ship swayed in the other’s face.
+
+“By God, Jacobs!” was all the mate could say.
+
+“You old stiff,” was all the terrible little cripple could retort.
+
+Mr. Pike gripped him by the collar and swung him in the air.
+
+“Are you goin’ down?—or am I goin’ to throw you down?” the mate
+demanded.
+
+I cannot describe their manner of utterance. It was that of wild
+beasts.
+
+“I ain’t ate outa your hand yet, have I?” was the reply.
+
+Mr. Pike tried to say something, still holding the cripple suspended,
+but he could do no more than strangle in his impotence of rage.
+
+“You’re an old stiff, an old stiff, an old stiff,” Mulligan Jacobs
+chanted, equally incoherent and unimaginative with brutish fury.
+
+“Say it again and over you go,” the mate managed to enunciate thickly.
+
+“You’re an old stiff,” gasped Mulligan Jacobs. He was flung. He soared
+through the air with the might of the fling, and even as he soared and
+fell through the darkness he reiterated:
+
+“Old stiff! Old stiff!”
+
+He fell among the men on Number Two hatch, and there were confusion and
+movement below, and groans.
+
+Mr. Pike paced up and down the narrow house and gritted his teeth. Then
+he paused. He leaned his arms on the bridge-rail, rested his head on
+his arms for a full minute, then groaned:
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” That was all. Then he went aft,
+slowly, dragging his feet along the bridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+
+The days grow gray. The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at
+meridian, it is lower in the northern sky. All the old stars have long
+since gone, and it would seem the sun is following them. The world—the
+only world I know—has been left behind far there to the north, and the
+hill of the earth is between it and us. This sad and solitary ocean,
+gray and cold, is the end of all things, the falling-off place where
+all things cease. Only it grows colder, and grayer, and penguins cry in
+the night, and huge amphibians moan and slubber, and great albatrosses,
+gray with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel and veer.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+“Land ho!” was the cry yesterday morning. I shivered as I gazed at
+this, the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago. There was no
+sun, and the morning was damp and cold with a brisk wind that
+penetrated any garment. The deck thermometer marked 30—two degrees
+below freezing-point; and now and then easy squalls of snow swept past.
+
+All of the land that was to be seen was snow. Long, low chains of
+peaks, snow-covered, arose out of the ocean. As we drew closer, there
+were no signs of life. It was a sheer, savage, bleak, forsaken land. By
+eleven, off the entrance of Le Maire Straits, the squalls ceased, the
+wind steadied, and the tide began to make through in the direction we
+desired to go.
+
+Captain West did not hesitate. His orders to Mr. Pike were quick and
+tranquil. The man at the wheel altered the course, while both watches
+sprang aloft to shake out royals and skysails. And yet Captain West
+knew every inch of the risk he took in this graveyard of ships.
+
+When we entered the narrow strait, under full sail and gripped by a
+tremendous tide, the rugged headlands of Tierra del Fuego dashed by
+with dizzying swiftness. Close we were to them, and close we were to
+the jagged coast of Staten Island on the opposite shore. It was here,
+in a wild bight, between two black and precipitous walls of rock where
+even the snow could find no lodgment, that Captain West paused in a
+casual sweep of his glasses and gazed steadily at one place. I picked
+the spot up with my own glasses and was aware of an instant chill as I
+saw the four masts of a great ship sticking out of the water. Whatever
+craft it was, it was as large as the _Elsinore_, and it had been but
+recently wrecked.
+
+“One of the German nitrate ships,” said Mr. Pike. Captain West nodded,
+still studying the wreck, then said:
+
+“She looks quite deserted. Just the same, Mr. Pike, send several of
+your best-sighted sailors aloft, and keep a good lookout yourself.
+There may be some survivors ashore trying to signal us.”
+
+But we sailed on, and no signals were seen. Mr. Pike was delighted with
+our good fortune. He was guilty of walking up and down, rubbing his
+hands and chuckling to himself. Not since 1888, he told me, had he been
+through the Straits of Le Maire. Also, he said that he knew of
+shipmasters who had made forty voyages around the Horn and had never
+once had the luck to win through the straits. The regular passage is
+far to the east around Staten Island, which means a loss of westing,
+and here, at the tip of the world, where the great west wind,
+unobstructed by any land, sweeps round and around the narrow girth of
+earth, westing is the thing that has to be fought for mile by mile and
+inch by inch. The Sailing Directions advise masters on the Horn
+passage: _Make Westing_. _Whatever you do_, _make westing_.
+
+When we emerged from the straits in the early afternoon the same steady
+breeze continued, and in the calm water under the lee of Tierra del
+Fuego, which extends south-westerly to the Horn, we slipped along at an
+eight-knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike was beside himself. He could scarcely tear himself from the
+deck when it was his watch below. He chuckled, rubbed his hands, and
+incessantly hummed snatches from the Twelfth Mass. Also, he was
+voluble.
+
+“To-morrow morning we’ll be up with the Horn. We’ll shave it by a dozen
+or fifteen miles. Think of it! We’ll just steal around! I never had
+such luck, and never expected to. Old girl _Elsinore_, you’re rotten
+for’ard, but the hand of God is at your helm.”
+
+Once, under the weather cloth, I came upon him talking to himself. It
+was more a prayer.
+
+“If only she don’t pipe up,” he kept repeating. “If only she don’t pipe
+up.”
+
+Mr. Mellaire was quite different.
+
+“It never happens,” he told me. “No ship ever went around like this.
+You watch her come. She always comes a-smoking out of the sou’west.”
+
+“But can’t a vessel ever steal around?” I asked.
+
+“The odds are mighty big against it, sir,” he answered. “I’ll give you
+a line on them. I’ll wager even, sir, just a nominal bet of a pound of
+tobacco, that inside twenty-four hours we’ll be hove to under
+upper-topsails. I’ll wager ten pounds to five that we’re not west of
+the Horn a week from now; and, fifty to fifty being the passage, twenty
+pounds to five that two weeks from now we’re not up with fifty in the
+Pacific.”
+
+As for Captain West, the perils of Le Maire behind, he sat below, his
+slippered feet stretched before him, smoking a cigar. He had nothing to
+say whatever, although Margaret and I were jubilant and dared duets
+through all of the second dog-watch.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And this morning, in a smooth sea and gentle breeze, the Horn bore
+almost due north of us not more than six miles away. Here we were, well
+abreast and reeling off westing.
+
+“What price tobacco this morning?” I quizzed Mr. Mellaire.
+
+“Going up,” he came back. “Wish I had a thousand bets like the one with
+you, sir.”
+
+I glanced about at sea and sky and gauged the speed of our way by the
+foam, but failed to see anything that warranted his remark. It was
+surely fine weather, and the steward, in token of the same, was trying
+to catch fluttering Cape pigeons with a bent pin on a piece of thread.
+
+For’ard, on the poop, I encountered Mr. Pike. It _was_ an encounter,
+for his salutation was a grunt.
+
+“Well, we’re going right along,” I ventured cheerily.
+
+He made no reply, but turned and stared into the gray south-west with
+an expression sourer than any I had ever seen on his face. He mumbled
+something I failed to catch, and, on my asking him to repeat it, he
+said:
+
+“It’s breeding weather. Can’t you see it?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“What d’ye think we’re taking off the kites for?” he growled.
+
+I looked aloft. The skysails were already furled; men were furling the
+royals; and the topgallant-yards were running down while clewlines and
+buntlines bagged the canvas. Yet, if anything, our northerly breeze
+fanned even more gently.
+
+“Bless me if I can see any weather,” I said.
+
+“Then go and take a look at the barometer,” he grunted, as he turned on
+his heel and swung away from me.
+
+In the chart-room was Captain West, pulling on his long sea-boots. That
+would have told me had there been no barometer, though the barometer
+was eloquent enough of itself. The night before it had stood at 30.10.
+It was now 28.64. Even in the pampero it had not been so low as that.
+
+“The usual Cape Horn programme,” Captain West smiled to me, as he stood
+up in all his lean and slender gracefulness and reached for his long
+oilskin coat.
+
+Still I could scarcely believe.
+
+“Is it very far away?” I inquired.
+
+He shook his head, and forebore in the act of speaking to lift his hand
+for me to listen. The _Elsinore_ rolled uneasily, and from without came
+the soft and hollow thunder of sails emptying themselves against the
+masts and gear.
+
+We had chatted a bare five minutes, when again he lifted his head. This
+time the _Elsinore_ heeled over slightly and remained heeled over,
+while the sighing whistle of a rising breeze awoke in the rigging.
+
+“It’s beginning to make,” he said, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of the
+sea.
+
+And then I heard Mr. Pike snarling out orders, and in my heart
+discovered a growing respect for Cape Horn—Cape Stiff, as the sailors
+call it.
+
+An hour later we were hove to on the port tack under upper-topsails and
+foresail. The wind had come out of the south-west, and our leeway was
+setting us down upon the land. Captain West gave orders to the mate to
+stand by to wear ship. Both watches had been taking in sail, so that
+both watches were on deck for the manoeuvre.
+
+It was astounding, the big sea that had arisen in so short a time. The
+wind was blowing a gale that ever, in recurring gusts, increased upon
+itself. Nothing was visible a hundred yards away. The day had become
+black-gray. In the cabin lamps were burning. The view from the poop,
+along the length of the great labouring ship, was magnificent. Seas
+burst and surged across her weather-rail and kept her deck half filled,
+despite the spouting ports and gushing scuppers.
+
+On each of the two houses and on the poop the ship’s complement, all in
+oilskins, was in groups. For’ard, Mr. Mellaire had charge. Mr. Pike
+took charge of the ’midship-house and the poop. Captain West strolled
+up and down, saw everything, said nothing; for it was the mate’s
+affair.
+
+When Mr. Pike ordered the wheel hard up, he slacked off all the
+mizzen-yards, and followed it with a partial slacking of the
+main-yards, so that the after-pressures were eased. The foresail and
+fore-lower- and-upper-topsails remained flat in order to pay the head
+off before the wind. All this took time. The men were slow, not strong,
+and without snap. They reminded me of dull oxen by the way they moved
+and pulled. And the gale, ever snorting harder, now snorted
+diabolically. Only at intervals could I glimpse the group on top the
+for’ard-house. Again and again, leaning to it and holding their heads
+down, the men on the ’midship-house were obliterated by the drive of
+crested seas that burst against the rail, spouted to the lower-yards,
+and swept in horizontal volumes across to leeward. And Mr. Pike, like
+an enormous spider in a wind-tossed web, went back and forth along the
+slender bridge that was itself a shaken thread in the blast of the
+storm.
+
+So tremendous were the gusts that for the time the _Elsinore_ refused
+to answer. She lay down to it; she was swept and racked by it; but her
+head did not pay off before it, and all the while we drove down upon
+that bitter, iron coast. And the world was black-gray, and violent, and
+very cold, with the flying spray freezing to ice in every lodgment.
+
+We waited. The groups of men, head down to it, waited. Mr. Pike,
+restless, angry, his blue eyes as bitter as the cold, his mouth as much
+a-snarl as the snarl of the elements with which he fought, waited. The
+Samurai waited, tranquil, casual, remote. And Cape Horn waited, there
+on our lee, for the bones of our ship and us.
+
+And then the _Elsinore’s_ bow paid off. The angle of the beat of the
+gale changed, and soon, with dreadful speed, we were dashing straight
+before it and straight toward the rocks we could not see. But all doubt
+was over. The success of the manoeuvre was assured. Mr. Mellaire,
+informed by messenger along the bridge from Mr. Pike, slacked off the
+head-yards. Mr. Pike, his eye on the helmsman, his hand signalling the
+order, had the wheel put over to port to check the _Elsinore’s_ rush
+into the wind as she came up on the starboard tack. All was activity.
+Main- and mizzen-yards were braced up, and the _Elsinore_, snugged down
+and hove to, had a lee of thousands of miles of Southern Ocean.
+
+And all this had been accomplished in the stamping ground of storm, at
+the end of the world, by a handful of wretched weaklings, under the
+drive of two strong mates, with behind them the placid will of the
+Samurai.
+
+It had taken thirty minutes to wear ship, and I had learned how the
+best of shipmasters can lose their ships without reproach. Suppose the
+_Elsinore_ had persisted in her refusal to payoff? Suppose anything had
+carried away? And right here enters Mr. Pike. It is his task ever to
+see that every rope and block and all the myriad other things in the
+vast and complicated gear of the _Elsinore_ are in strength not to
+carry away. Always have the masters of our race required henchmen like
+Mr. Pike, and it seems the race has well supplied those henchmen.
+
+Ere I went below I heard Captain West tell Mr. Pike that while both
+watches were on deck it would be just as well to put a reef in the
+foresail before they furled it. The mainsail and the crojack being off,
+I could see the men black on the fore-yard. For half-an-hour I
+lingered, watching them. They seemed to make no progress with the reef.
+Mr. Mellaire was with them, having direct supervision of the job, while
+Mr. Pike, on the poop, growled and grumbled and spat endless
+blasphemies into the flying air.
+
+“What’s the matter?” I asked.
+
+“Two watches on a single yardarm and unable to put a reef in a
+handkerchief like that!” he snorted. “What’ll it be if we’re off here a
+month?”
+
+“A month!” I cried.
+
+“A month isn’t anything for Cape Stiff,” he said grimly. “I’ve been off
+here seven weeks and then turned tail and run around the other way.”
+
+“Around the world?” I gasped.
+
+“It was the only way to get to ’Frisco,” he answered. “The Horn’s the
+Horn, and there’s no summer seas that I’ve ever noticed in this
+neighbourhood.”
+
+My fingers were numb and I was chilled through when I took a last look
+at the wretched men on the fore-yard and went below to warm up.
+
+A little later, as I went in to table, through a cabin port I stole a
+look for’ard between seas and saw the men still struggling on the
+freezing yard.
+
+The four of us were at table, and it was very comfortable, in spite of
+the _Elsinore’s_ violent antics. The room was warm. The storm-racks on
+the table kept each dish in its place. The steward served and moved
+about with ease and apparent unconcern, although I noticed an
+occasional anxious gleam in his eyes when he poised some dish at a
+moment when the ship pitched and flung with unusual wildness.
+
+And now and again I thought of the poor devils on the yard. Well, they
+belonged there by right, just as we belonged here by right in this
+oasis of the cabin. I looked at Mr. Pike and wagered to myself that
+half-a-dozen like him could master that stubborn foresail. As for the
+Samurai, I was convinced that alone, not moving from his seat, by a
+tranquil exertion of will, he could accomplish the same thing.
+
+The lighted sea-lamps swung and leaped in their gimbals, ever battling
+with the dancing shadows in the murky gray. The wood-work creaked and
+groaned. The jiggermast, a huge cylinder of hollow steel that
+perforated the apartment through deck above and floor beneath, was
+hideously vocal with the storm. Far above, taut ropes beat against it
+so that it clanged like a boiler-shop. There was a perpetual thunder of
+seas falling on our deck and crash of water against our for’ard wall;
+while the ten thousand ropes and gears aloft bellowed and screamed as
+the storm smote them.
+
+And yet all this was from without. Here, at this well-appointed table,
+was no draught nor breath of wind, no drive of spray nor wash of sea.
+We were in the heart of peace in the midmost centre of the storm.
+Margaret was in high spirits, and her laughter vied with the clang of
+the jiggermast. Mr. Pike was gloomy, but I knew him well enough to
+attribute his gloom, not to the elements, but to the inefficients
+futilely freezing on the yard. As for me, I looked about at the four of
+us—blue-eyed, gray-eyed, all fair-skinned and royal blond—and somehow
+it seemed that I had long since lived this, and that with me and in me
+were all my ancestors, and that their lives and memories were mine, and
+that all this vexation of the sea and air and labouring ship was of old
+time and a thousand times before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+
+“How are you for a climb?” Margaret asked me, shortly after we had left
+the table.
+
+She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou’wester, and
+sea-boots.
+
+“I’ve never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed,” she
+went on. “Have you a good head?”
+
+I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged, and
+clapped my hands for Wada.
+
+“Will you?” she cried eagerly.
+
+“If you let me lead,” I answered airily, “and if you will promise to
+hold on tight. Whither away?”
+
+“Into the top of the jigger. It’s the easiest. As for holding on,
+please remember that I have often done it. It is with you the doubt
+rests.”
+
+“Very well,” I retorted; “do you lead then. I shall hold on tight.”
+
+“I have seen many a landsman funk it,” she teased. “There are no
+lubber-holes in our tops.”
+
+“And most likely I shall,” I agreed. “I’ve never been aloft in my life,
+and since there is no hole for a lubber.”
+
+She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I
+extended my arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
+
+On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre. The universe
+was very immediately about us. It blanketed us in storming wind and
+flying spray and grayness. Our main deck was impassable, and the relief
+of the wheel came aft along the bridge. It was two o’clock, and for
+over two hours the frozen wretches had laid out upon the fore-yard.
+They were still there, weak, feeble, hopeless. Captain West, stepping
+out in the lee of the chart-house, gazed at them for several minutes.
+
+“We’ll have to give up that reef,” he said to Mr. Pike. “Just make the
+sail fast. Better put on double gaskets.”
+
+And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as
+spray and the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for’ard along
+the bridge to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-masted ship
+that could not reef a foresail.
+
+It is true. They could not do it, despite their willingness, for this I
+have learned: _the men do their weak best whenever the order is given
+to shorten sail_. It must be that they are afraid. They lack the iron
+of Mr. Pike, the wisdom and the iron of Captain West. Always, have I
+noticed, with all the alacrity of which they are capable, do they
+respond to any order to shorten down. That is why they are for’ard, in
+that pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack the iron. Well, I can
+say only this: If nothing else could have prevented the funk hinted at
+by Margaret, the sorry spectacle of these ironless, spineless creatures
+was sufficient safeguard. How could I funk in the face of their
+weakness—I, who lived aft in the high place?
+
+Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the
+pin-rail at the foot of the weather jigger-rigging. But it was merely
+the recognition of a courtesy on her part, for the next moment she
+released her mittened hand from mine, swung boldly outboard into the
+face of the gale, and around against the ratlines. Then she began to
+climb. I followed, almost unaware of the ticklishness of the exploit to
+a tyro, so buoyed up was I by her example and by my scorn of the
+weaklings for’ard. Where men could go, I could go. What men could do, I
+could do. And no daughter of the Samurai could out-game me.
+
+Yet it was slow work. In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts one
+was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging. At such
+times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor foot.
+Also, there was no need for holding on. As I have said, one was pinned
+against the rigging by the wind.
+
+Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me,
+until a fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the
+sea, in which case the result would be frigid drowning. And still
+Margaret climbed. Without pause she went out under the overhanging
+platform of the top, shifted her holds to the rigging that went aloft
+from it, and swung around this rigging, easily, carelessly, timing the
+action to the roll, and stood safely upon the top.
+
+I followed. I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my
+back to the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my
+hands for holds I could not see. I was in an ecstasy. I could dare
+anything. Had she sprung into the air, stretched out her arms, and
+soared away on the breast of the gale, I should have unhesitatingly
+followed her.
+
+As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view, I
+could see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes. And as I swung
+around the rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in her eyes
+that was quickly routed by petulance.
+
+“Oh, you’ve done this sort of thing before,” she reproached, calling
+loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
+
+I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again. She
+nodded and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into
+snow-swirled space from the edge of the top. I sat beside her, looking
+down into the snow that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth out
+of which we had climbed.
+
+We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air on
+a steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into snow.
+We had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had ceased to
+be. But no. Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless wings, driving
+fully eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge albatross. He
+must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. He had seen his
+danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on the blast, he
+carelessly veered clear of collision. His head and neck were rimed with
+age or frost—we could not tell which—and his bright bead-eye noted us
+as he passed and whirled away on a great circle into the snow to
+leeward.
+
+Margaret’s hand shot out to mine.
+
+“It alone was worth the climb!” she cried. And then the _Elsinore_
+flung down, and Margaret’s hand clutched tighter for holding, while
+from the hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west
+wind drift upon our decks.
+
+Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
+quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
+beneath us—the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-head
+buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life back on
+top the for’ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-drive of
+ocean, and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr. Mellaire,
+with a handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the tiller. And we
+saw the Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house, swaying with
+casual surety on the mad deck, as he spoke what must have been
+instructions to Mr. Pike.
+
+The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
+hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy
+gray-beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the windward
+murky gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the _Elsinore_, one
+moment overtoppling her slender frailness, the next moment splashing a
+hundred tons of water on her deck and flinging her skyward as they
+passed beneath and foamed and crested from sight in the murky gray to
+leeward. And the great albatrosses veered and circled about us, beating
+up into the bitter violence of the gale and sweeping grandly away
+before it far faster than it blew.
+
+Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent,
+questioning eyes. With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew
+aside the ear-flap of her sou’wester and shouted:
+
+“It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
+fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites my
+nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening. I
+know, now, that my forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in their
+own day. With them I have raided English coasts, dared the Pillars of
+Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high place of
+government over the soft sun-warm peoples. I am Hengist and Horsa; I am
+of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have bearded and
+bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages
+came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the
+mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the
+walls of deep-buried caves—ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with
+my brother-cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me.”
+
+She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
+cheeks, and the _Elsinore_ flung over and down as if she would never
+rise again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying
+arc. Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my
+ear-flap.
+
+“I don’t know anything about it,” she cried. “It sounds like poetry.
+But I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it
+aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back
+the frost and night.”
+
+“And the books?” she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.
+
+“They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools that
+wrote them,” I replied.
+
+Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as
+she swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she caught
+footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out of my
+sight under the perilous overhang of the top.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+
+“What price tobacco?” was Mr. Mellaire’s greeting, when I came on deck
+this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle from
+sixty hours of being tossed about.
+
+The wind had fallen to a dead calm toward morning, and the Elsinore,
+her several spread sails booming and slatting, rolled more miserably
+than ever. Mr. Mellaire pointed for’ard of our starboard beam. I could
+make out a bleak land of white and jagged peaks.
+
+“Staten Island, the easterly end of it,” said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+And I knew that we were in the position of a vessel just rounding
+Staten Island preliminary to bucking the Horn. And, yet, four days ago,
+we had run through the Straits of Le Maire and stolen along toward the
+Horn. Three days ago we had been well abreast of the Horn and even a
+few miles past. And here we were now, starting all over again and far
+in the rear of where we had originally started.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The condition of the men is truly wretched. During the gale the
+forecastle was washed out twice. This means that everything in it was
+afloat and that every article of clothing, including mattresses and
+blankets, is wet and will remain wet in this bitter weather until we
+are around the Horn and well up in the good-weather latitudes. The same
+is true of the ’midship-house. Every room in it, with the exception of
+the cook’s and the sail-makers’ (which open for’ard on Number Two
+hatch), is soaking. And they have no fires in their rooms with which to
+dry things out.
+
+I peeped into Charles Davis’s room. It was terrible. He grinned to me
+and nodded his head.
+
+“It’s just as well O’Sullivan wasn’t here, sir,” he said. “He’d
+a-drowned in the lower bunk. And I want to tell you I was doing some
+swimmin’ before I could get into the top one. And salt water’s bad for
+my sores. I oughtn’t to be in a hole like this in Cape Horn weather.
+Look at the ice, there, on the floor. It’s below freezin’ right now in
+this room, and my blankets are wet, and I’m a sick man, as any man can
+tell that’s got a nose.”
+
+“If you’d been decent to the mate you might have got decent treatment
+in return,” I said.
+
+“Huh!” he sneered. “You needn’t think you can lose me, sir. I can grow
+fat on this sort of stuff. Why, sir, when I think of the court doin’s
+in Seattle I just couldn’t die. An’ if you’ll listen to me, sir, you’ll
+cover the steward’s money. You can’t lose. I’m advisin’ you, sir,
+because you’re a sort of decent sort. Anybody that bets on my going
+over the side is a sure loser.”
+
+“How could you dare ship on a voyage like this in your condition?” I
+demanded.
+
+“Condition?” he queried with a fine assumption of innocence. “Why, that
+is why I did ship. I was in tiptop shape when I sailed. All this come
+out on me afterward. You remember seein’ me aloft, an’ up to my neck in
+water. And I trimmed coal below, too. A sick man couldn’t do it. And
+remember, sir, you’ll have to testify to how I did my duty at the
+beginning before I took down.”
+
+“I’ll bet with you myself if you think I’m goin’ to die,” he called
+after me.
+
+Already the sailors show marks of the hardship they are enduring. It is
+surprising, in so short a time, how lean their faces have grown, how
+lined and seamed. They must dry their underclothing with their body
+heat. Their outer garments, under their oilskins, are soggy. And yet,
+paradoxically, despite their lean, drawn faces, they have grown very
+stout. Their walk is a waddle, and they bulge with seeming corpulency.
+This is due to the amount of clothing they have on. I noticed Larry,
+to-day, had on two vests, two coats, and an overcoat, with his oilskin
+outside of that. They are elephantine in their gait for, in addition to
+everything else, they have wrapped their feet, outside their sea-boots,
+with gunny sacking.
+
+It _is_ cold, although the deck thermometer stood at thirty-three
+to-day at noon. I had Wada weigh the clothing I wear on deck. Omitting
+oilskins and boots, it came to eighteen pounds. And yet I am not any
+too warm in all this gear when the wind is blowing. How sailors, after
+having once experienced the Horn, can ever sign on again for a voyage
+around is beyond me. It but serves to show how stupid they must be.
+
+I feel sorry for Henry, the training-ship boy. He is more my own kind,
+and some day he will make a henchman of the afterguard and a mate like
+Mr. Pike. In the meantime, along with Buckwheat, the other boy who
+berths in the ’midship-house with him, he suffers the same hardship as
+the men. He is very fair-skinned, and I noticed this afternoon, when he
+was pulling on a brace, that the sleeves of his oil-skins, assisted by
+the salt water, have chafed his wrists till they are raw and bleeding
+and breaking out in sea-boils. Mr. Mellaire tells me that in another
+week there will be a plague of these boils with all hands for’ard.
+
+“When do you think we’ll be up with the Horn again?” I innocently
+queried of Mr. Pike.
+
+He turned upon me in a rage, as if I had insulted him, and positively
+snarled in my face ere he swung away without the courtesy of an answer.
+It is evident that he takes the sea seriously. That is why, I fancy, he
+is so excellent a seaman.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The days pass—if the interval of sombre gray that comes between the
+darknesses can be called day. For a week, now, we have not seen the
+sun. Our ship’s position in this waste of storm and sea is conjectural.
+Once, by dead reckoning, we gained up with the Horn and a hundred miles
+south of it. And then came another sou’west gale that tore our
+fore-topsail and brand new spencer out of the belt-ropes and swept us
+away to a conjectured longitude east of Staten Island.
+
+Oh, I know now this Great West Wind that blows forever around the world
+south of 55. And I know why the chart-makers have capitalized it, as,
+for instance, when I read “The Great West Wind Drift.” And I know why
+the _Sailing Directions_ advise: “_Whatever you do_, _make westing_!
+_make westing_!”
+
+And the West Wind and the drift of the West Wind will not permit the
+_Elsinore_ to make westing. Gale follows gale, always from the west,
+and we make easting. And it is bitter cold, and each gale snorts up
+with a prelude of driving snow.
+
+In the cabin the lamps burn all day long. No more does Mr. Pike run the
+phonograph, nor does Margaret ever touch the piano. She complains of
+being bruised and sore. I have a wrenched shoulder from being hurled
+against the wall. And both Wada and the steward are limping. Really,
+the only comfort I can find is in my bunk, so wedged with boxes and
+pillows that the wildest rolls cannot throw me out. There, save for my
+meals and for an occasional run on deck for exercise and fresh air, I
+lie and read eighteen and nineteen hours out of the twenty-four. But
+the unending physical strain is very wearisome.
+
+How it must be with the poor devils for’ard is beyond conceiving. The
+forecastle has been washed out several times, and everything is soaking
+wet. Besides, they have grown weaker, and two watches are required to
+do what one ordinary watch could do. Thus, they must spend as many
+hours on the sea-swept deck and aloft on the freezing yards as I do in
+my warm, dry bunk. Wada tells me that they never undress, but turn into
+their wet bunks in their oil-skins and sea-boots and wet undergarments.
+
+To look at them crawling about on deck or in the rigging is enough.
+They are truly weak. They are gaunt-cheeked and haggard-gray of skin,
+with great dark circles under their eyes. The predicted plague of
+sea-boils and sea-cuts has come, and their hands and wrists and arms
+are frightfully afflicted. Now one, and now another, and sometimes
+several, either from being knocked down by seas or from general
+miserableness, take to the bunk for a day or so off. This means more
+work for the others, so that the men on their feet are not tolerant of
+the sick ones, and a man must be very sick to escape being dragged out
+to work by his mates.
+
+I cannot but marvel at Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs. Old and fragile as
+they are, it seems impossible that they can endure what they do. For
+that matter, I cannot understand why they work at all. I cannot
+understand why any of them toil on and obey an order in this freezing
+hell of the Horn. Is it because of fear of death that they do not cease
+work and bring death to all of us? Or is it because they are
+slave-beasts, with a slave-psychology, so used all their lives to being
+driven by their masters that it is beyond their mental power to refuse
+to obey?
+
+And yet most of them, in a week after we reach Seattle, will be on
+board other ships outward bound for the Horn. Margaret says the reason
+for this is that sailors forget. Mr. Pike agrees. He says give them a
+week in the south-east trades as we run up the Pacific and they will
+have forgotten that they have ever been around the Horn. I wonder. Can
+they be as stupid as this? Does pain leave no record with them? Do they
+fear only the immediate thing? Have they no horizons wider than a day?
+Then indeed do they belong where they are.
+
+They _are_ cowardly. This was shown conclusively this morning at two
+o’clock. Never have I witnessed such panic fear, and it was fear of the
+immediate thing—fear, stupid and beast-like. It was Mr. Mellaire’s
+watch. As luck would have it, I was reading Boas’s _Mind of Primitive
+Man_ when I heard the rush of feet over my head. The _Elsinore_ was
+hove to on the port tack at the time, under very short canvas. I was
+wondering what emergency had brought the watch upon the poop, when I
+heard another rush of feet that meant the second watch. I heard no
+pulling and hauling, and the thought of mutiny flashed across my mind.
+
+Still nothing happened, and, growing curious, I got into my sea-boots,
+sheepskin coat, and oilskin, put on my sou’wester and mittens, and went
+on deck. Mr. Pike had already dressed and was ahead of me. Captain
+West, who in this bad weather sleeps in the chart-room, stood in the
+lee doorway of the house, through which the lamplight streamed on the
+frightened faces of the men.
+
+Those of the ’midship-house were not present, but every man Jack of the
+forecastle, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, as I
+afterwards learned, had joined in the flight aft. Andy Fay, who
+belonged in the watch below, had calmly remained in his bunk, while
+Mulligan Jacobs had taken advantage of the opportunity to sneak into
+the forecastle and fill his pipe.
+
+“What is the matter, Mr. Pike?” Captain West asked.
+
+Before the mate could reply, Bert Rhine snickered:
+
+“The devil’s come aboard, sir.”
+
+But his snicker was palpably an assumption of unconcern he did not
+possess. The more I think over it the more I am surprised that such
+keen men as the gangsters should have been frightened by what had
+occurred. But frightened they were, the three of them, out of their
+bunks and out of the precious surcease of their brief watch below.
+
+So fear-struck was Larry that he chattered and grimaced like an ape,
+and shouldered and struggled to get away from the dark and into the
+safety of the shaft of light that shone out of the chart-house. Tony,
+the Greek, was just as bad, mumbling to himself and continually
+crossing himself. He was joined in this, as a sort of chorus, by the
+two Italians, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. Arthur Deacon was almost
+in collapse, and he and Chantz, the Jew, shamelessly clung to each
+other for support. Bob, the fat and overgrown youth, was sobbing, while
+the other youth, Bony the Splinter, was shivering and chattering his
+teeth. Yes, and the two best sailors for’ard, Tom Spink and the Maltese
+Cockney, stood in the background, their backs to the dark, their faces
+yearning toward the light.
+
+More than all other contemptible things in this world there are two
+that I loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice in a
+man. The first turns me to ice. I cannot sympathize with hysteria. The
+second turns my stomach. Cowardice in a man is to me positively
+nauseous. And this fear-smitten mass of human animals on our reeling
+poop raised my gorge. Truly, had I been a god at that moment, I should
+have annihilated the whole mass of them. No; I should have been
+merciful to one. He was the Faun. His bright, pain-liquid, and
+flashing-eager eyes strained from face to face with desire to
+understand. He did not know what had occurred, and, being stone-deaf,
+had thought the rush aft a response to a call for all hands.
+
+I noticed Mr. Mellaire. He may be afraid of Mr. Pike, and he is a
+murderer; but at any rate he has no fear of the supernatural. With two
+men above him in authority, although it was his watch, there was no
+call for him to do anything. He swayed back and forth in balance to the
+violent motions of the _Elsinore_ and looked on with eyes that were
+amused and cynical.
+
+“What does the devil look like, my man?” Captain West asked.
+
+Bert Rhine grinned sheepishly.
+
+“Answer the captain!” Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster’s eyes
+for the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl. Then he replied to
+Captain West:
+
+“I didn’t wait to see, sir. But it’s one whale of a devil.”
+
+“He’s as big as a elephant, sir,” volunteered Bill Quigley. “I seen’m
+face to face, sir. He almost got me when I run out of the fo’c’s’le.”
+
+“Oh, Lord, sir!” Larry moaned. “The way he hit the house, sir. It was
+the call to Judgment.”
+
+“Your theology is mixed, my man,” Captain West smiled quietly, though I
+could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his
+wonderful Samurai eyes.
+
+He turned to the mate.
+
+“Mr. Pike, will you please go for’ard and interview this devil? Fasten
+him up and tie him down and I’ll take a look at him in the morning.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Pike; and Kipling’s line came to me:
+
+“Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?”
+
+
+And as I went for’ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and
+Mr. Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge—not a sailor
+dared to accompany us—other lines of “The Galley Slave” drifted through
+my brain, such as:
+
+“Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold—
+We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . ”
+
+
+And:
+
+“By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,
+By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . . .
+”
+
+
+And:
+
+“Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone by
+. . . ”
+
+
+And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of the
+race, and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful
+henchman, the able sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and
+galled, the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea. I
+know him now. He can never again offend me. I forgive him
+everything—the whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at
+Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his savagery
+to the men, his snarl and his sneer.
+
+On top the ’midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to
+recall. I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin about
+my neck, so that I was wet to the skin. We crossed the next span of
+bridge through driving spray, and were well upon the top of the
+for’ard-house when something adrift on the deck hit the for’ard wall a
+terrific smash.
+
+“Whatever it is, it’s playing the devil,” Mr. Pike yelled in my ear, as
+he endeavoured to locate the thing by the dry-battery light-stick which
+he carried.
+
+The pencil of light travelled over dark water, white with foam, that
+churned upon the deck.
+
+“There it goes!” Mr. Pike cried, as the _Elsinore_ dipped by the head
+and hurtled the water for’ard.
+
+The light went out as the three of us caught holds and crouched to a
+deluge of water from overside. As we emerged, from under the
+forecastle-head we heard a tremendous thumping and battering. Then, as
+the bow lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that immediately
+lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object that bounded down the inclined
+deck where no water was. What became of it we could not see.
+
+Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire. Again, as the
+_Elsinore_ dipped by the head and fetched a surge of sea-water from aft
+along the runway, I saw the dark object bound for’ard directly at the
+mates. They sprang to safety from its charge, the light went out, while
+another icy sea broke aboard.
+
+For a time I could see nothing of the two men. Next, in the light
+flashed from the stick, I guessed that Mr. Pike was in pursuit of the
+thing. He evidently must have captured it at the rail against the
+starboard rigging and caught a turn around it with a loose end of rope.
+As the vessel rolled to windward some sort of a struggle seemed to be
+going on. The second mate sprang to the mate’s assistance, and,
+together, with more loose ends, they seemed to subdue the thing.
+
+I descended to see. By the light-stick we made it out to be a large,
+barnacle-crusted cask.
+
+“She’s been afloat for forty years,” was Mr. Pike’s judgment. “Look at
+the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers.”
+
+“And it’s full of something,” said Mr. Mellaire. “Hope it isn’t water.”
+
+I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for’ard,
+between seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the
+shelter under the forecastle-head. As a result, even through my
+mittens, I was cut by the sharp edges of broken shell.
+
+“It’s liquor of some sort,” said the mate, “but we won’t risk broaching
+it till morning.”
+
+“But where did it come from?” I asked.
+
+“Over the side’s the only place it could have come from.” Mr. Pike
+played the light over it. “Look at it! It’s been afloat for years and
+years.”
+
+“The stuff ought to be well-seasoned,” commented Mr. Mellaire.
+
+Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the
+forecastle and peered in. The men, in their headlong flight, had
+neglected to close the doors, and the place was afloat. In the
+flickering light from a small and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal
+picture. No self-respecting cave-man, I am sure, would have lived in
+such a hole.
+
+Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house and
+rail, and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water
+rushed waist-deep. I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the
+room. From a top bunk, lying on his side, Andy Fay regarded me steadily
+with his bitter blue eyes. Seated on the rough table of heavy planks,
+his sea-booted feet swinging in the water, Mulligan Jacobs pulled at
+his pipe. When he observed me he pointed to pulpy book-pages that
+floated about.
+
+“Me library’s gone to hell,” he mourned as he indicated the flotsam.
+“There’s me Byron. An’ there goes Zola an’ Browning with a piece of
+Shakespeare runnin’ neck an’ neck, an’ what’s left of _Anti-Christ_
+makin’ a bad last. An’ there’s Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl you
+can’t tell ’em apart.”
+
+Here the _Elsinore_ lay down to starboard, and the water in the
+forecastle poured out against my legs and hips. My wet mittens slipped
+on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the scuppers, where
+I was turned over and over by another flood that had just boarded from
+windward.
+
+I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal of
+salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and climbed
+to the top of the house. On my way aft along the bridge I encountered
+the crew coming for’ard. Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were talking in the
+lee of the chart-house, and inside, as I passed below, Captain West was
+smoking a cigar.
+
+After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk
+with the _Mind of Primitive Man_ before me, when the stampede over my
+head was repeated. I waited for the second rush. It came, and I
+proceeded to dress.
+
+The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men
+were more excited, more frightened. They were babbling and chattering
+all together.
+
+“Shut up!” Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them. “One at a time,
+and answer the captain’s question.”
+
+“It ain’t no barrel this time, sir,” Tom Spink said. “It’s alive. An’
+if it ain’t the devil it’s the ghost of a drownded man. I see ’m plain
+an’ clear. He’s a man, or was a man once—”
+
+“They was two of ’em, sir,” Richard Giller, one of the “bricklayers,”
+broke in.
+
+“I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir,” Tom Spink went on.
+
+“An’ the other was Jespersen—I seen ’m,” Giller added.
+
+“They was three of ’em, sir,” said Nosey Murphy. “O’Sullivan, sir, was
+the other one. They ain’t devils, sir. They’re drownded men. They come
+aboard right over the bows, an’ they moved slow like drownded men.
+Sorensen seen the first one first. He caught my arm an’ pointed, an’
+then I seen ’m. He was on top the for’ard-house. And Olansen seen ’m,
+an’ Deacon, sir, an’ Hackey. We all seen ’m, sir . . . an’ the second
+one; an’ when the rest run away I stayed long enough to see the third
+one. Mebbe there’s more. I didn’t wait to see.”
+
+Captain West stopped the man.
+
+“Mr. Pike,” he said wearily, “will you straighten this nonsense out.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the men. “Come on, all
+of you! There’s three devils to tie down this time.”
+
+But the men shrank away from the order and from him.
+
+“For two cents . . . ” I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke
+off utterance.
+
+He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge. In the same
+order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up
+the rear, we followed. It was a similar journey, save that we caught a
+ducking midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on the
+’midship-house.
+
+We halted on top the for’ard-house. In vain Mr. Pike flashed his
+light-stick. Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked
+dark water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the
+crash and thunder of seas falling aboard. We advanced half-way across
+the last span of bridge to the fore-castle head, and were driven to
+pause and hang on at the foremast by a bursting sea.
+
+Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick. I heard him
+exclaim something. Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed by
+Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and
+endured another ducking. Through the emergencies I could see the pencil
+of light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there. Several
+minutes later the mates were back with me.
+
+“Half our head-gear’s carried away,” Mr. Pike told me. “We must have
+run into something.”
+
+“I felt a jar, right after you’ went below, sir, last time,” said Mr.
+Mellaire. “Only I thought it was a thump of sea.”
+
+“So did I feel it,” the mate agreed. “I was just taking off my boots. I
+thought it was a sea. But where are the three devils?”
+
+“Broaching the cask,” the second mate suggested.
+
+We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went
+for’ard, inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea. There lay the
+cask, securely lashed. The size of the barnacles on it was astonishing.
+They were as large as apples and inches deep. A down-fling of bow
+brought a foot of water about our boots; and as the bow lifted and the
+water drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted cask streamers
+of seaweed a foot or so in length.
+
+Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the
+deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for’ard-house and
+found no devils. The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his
+light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky
+sea-lamp. And we saw the devils. Nosey Murphy had been right. There
+were three of them.
+
+Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty,
+paint-scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with
+the filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea. In a top bunk,
+on his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily with blue,
+bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe, with hanging
+legs dragged this way and that by the churn of water, Mulligan Jacobs,
+solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody, who stand side by
+side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the
+_Elsinore’s_ down-flinging and up-lifting.
+
+But such men! I know my East Side and my East End, and I am accustomed
+to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was
+at fault. The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had
+Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were
+they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow. Their skin was white under a
+bronze of weather. Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless,
+sandy hair. Yet their eyes were dark—and yet not dark. They were
+neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel. Nor were they black. They
+were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of
+great cats. They regarded us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired
+storm-waifs with pale, topaz eyes. They did not bow, they did not
+smile, in no way did they recognize our presence save that they looked
+at us and dreamed.
+
+But Andy Fay greeted us.
+
+“It’s a hell of a night an’ not a wink of sleep with these goings-on,”
+he said.
+
+“Now where did they blow in from a night like this?” Mulligan Jacobs
+complained.
+
+“You’ve got a tongue in your mouth,” Mr. Pike snarled. “Why ain’t you
+asked ’em?”
+
+“As though you didn’t know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you old
+stiff,” Jacobs snarled back.
+
+But it was no time for their private feud. Mr. Pike turned on the
+dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted
+phrases of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon
+has had every opportunity to learn but is too stubborn-brained and
+wilful-mouthed to wrap his tongue about.
+
+The visitors made no reply. They did not even shake their heads. Their
+faces remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and pleasant,
+while in their eyes floated profounder dreams. Yet they were human. The
+blood of their injuries stained them and clotted on their clothes.
+
+“Dutchmen,” snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other breeds,
+as he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.
+
+Mr. Pike’s ethnology is narrow. Outside his own race he is aware of
+only three races: niggers, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.
+
+Again our visitors proved themselves human. They understood the mate’s
+invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed into three
+top-bunks and closed their eyes. I could swear the first of them was
+asleep in half a minute.
+
+“We’ll have to clean up for’ard, or we’ll be having the sticks about
+our ears,” the mate said, already starting to depart. “Get the men
+along, Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.
+
+
+And no westing! We have been swept back three degrees of easting since
+the night our visitors came on board. They are the great mystery, these
+three men of the sea. “Horn Gypsies,” Margaret calls them; and Mr. Pike
+dubs them “Dutchmen.” One thing is certain, they have a language of
+their own which they talk with one another. But of our hotch-potch of
+nationalities fore and aft there is no person who catches an inkling of
+their language or nationality.
+
+Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but
+this was indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter, who
+swears he is a Finn himself. Louis, the cook, avers that somewhere over
+the world, on some forgotten voyage, he has encountered men of their
+type; but he can neither remember the voyage nor their race. He and the
+rest of the Asiatics accept their presence as a matter of course; but
+the crew, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very
+superstitious about the new-comers, and will have nothing to do with
+them.
+
+“No good will come of them, sir,” Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us,
+shaking his head forebodingly.
+
+Margaret’s mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy
+roll of the ship. We had paused from our promenade, which we now take
+each day, religiously, as a constitutional, between eleven and twelve.
+
+“Why, what is the matter with them?” she queried, nudging me privily in
+warning of what was coming.
+
+“Because they ain’t men, Miss, as we can rightly call men. They ain’t
+regular men.”
+
+“It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board,” she gurgled.
+
+“That’s just it, Miss,” Tom Spink exclaimed, brightening perceptibly at
+the hint of understanding. “Where’d they come from? They won’t tell. Of
+course they won’t tell. They ain’t men. They’re spirits—ghosts of
+sailors that drowned as long ago as when that cask went adrift from a
+sinkin’ ship, an’ that’s years an’ years, Miss, as anybody can see,
+lookin’ at the size of the barnacles on it.”
+
+“Do you think so?” Margaret queried.
+
+“We all think so, Miss. We ain’t spent our lives on the sea for
+nothin’. There’s no end of landsmen don’t believe in the Flyin’
+Dutchman. But what do they know? They’re just landsmen, ain’t they?
+They ain’t never had their leg grabbed by a ghost, such as I had, on
+the _Kathleen_, thirty-five years ago, down in the hole ’tween the
+water-casks. An’ didn’t that ghost rip the shoe right off of me? An’
+didn’t I fall through the hatch two days later an’ break my shoulder?”
+
+“Now, Miss, I seen ’em makin’ signs to Mr. Pike that we’d run into
+their ship hove to on the other tack. Don’t you believe it. There
+wasn’t no ship.”
+
+“But how do you explain the carrying away of our head-gear?” I
+demanded.
+
+“There’s lots of things can’t be explained, sir,” was Tom Spink’s
+answer. “Who can explain the way the Finns plays tom-fool tricks with
+the weather? Yet everybody knows it. Why are we havin’ a hard passage
+around the Horn, sir? I ask you that. Why, sir?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Because of the carpenter, sir. We’ve found out he’s a Finn. Why did he
+keep it quiet all the way down from Baltimore?”
+
+“Why did he tell it?” Margaret challenged.
+
+“He didn’t tell it, Miss—leastways, not until after them three others
+boarded us. I got my suspicions he knows more about ’m than he’s
+lettin’ on. An’ look at the weather an’ the delay we’re gettin’. An’
+don’t everybody know the Finns is regular warlocks an’
+weather-breeders?”
+
+My ears pricked up.
+
+“Where did you get that word _warlock_?” I questioned.
+
+Tom Spink looked puzzled.
+
+“What’s wrong with it, sir?” he asked.
+
+“Nothing. It’s all right. But where did you get it?”
+
+“I never got it, sir. I always had it. That’s what Finns is—warlocks.”
+
+“And these three new-comers—they aren’t Finns?” asked Margaret.
+
+The old Englishman shook his head solemnly.
+
+“No, Miss. They’re drownded sailors a long time drownded. All you have
+to do is look at ’m. An’ the carpenter could tell us a few if he was
+minded.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Nevertheless, our mysterious visitors are a welcome addition to our
+weakened crew. I watch them at work. They are strong and willing. Mr.
+Pike says they are real sailormen, even if he doesn’t understand their
+lingo. His theory is that they are from some small old-country or
+outlander ship, which, hove to on the opposite tack to the _Elsinore_,
+was run down and sunk.
+
+I have forgotten to say that we found the barnacled cask nearly filled
+with a most delicious wine which none of us can name. As soon as the
+gale moderated Mr. Pike had the cask brought aft and broached, and now
+the steward and Wada have it all in bottles and spare demijohns. It is
+beautifully aged, and Mr. Pike is certain that it is some sort of a
+mild and unheard-of brandy. Mr. Mellaire merely smacks his lips over
+it, while Captain West, Margaret, and I steadfastly maintain that it is
+wine.
+
+The condition of the men grows deplorable. They were always poor at
+pulling on ropes, but now it takes two or three to pull as much as one
+used to pull. One thing in their favour is that they are well, though
+grossly, fed. They have all they want to eat, such as it is, but it is
+the cold and wet, the terrible condition of the forecastle, the lack of
+sleep, and the almost continuous toil of both watches on deck. Either
+watch is so weak and worthless that any severe task requires the
+assistance of the other watch. As an instance, we finally managed a
+reef in the foresail in the thick of a gale. It took both watches two
+hours, yet Mr. Pike tells me that under similar circumstances, with an
+average crew of the old days, he has seen a single watch reef the
+foresail in twenty minutes.
+
+I have learned one of the prime virtues of a steel sailing-ship. Such a
+craft, heavily laden, does not strain her seams open in bad weather and
+big seas. Except for a tiny leak down in the fore-peak, with which we
+sailed from Baltimore and which is bailed out with a pail once in
+several weeks, the _Elsinore_ is bone-dry. Mr. Pike tells me that had a
+wooden ship of her size and cargo gone through the buffeting we have
+endured, she would be leaking like a sieve.
+
+And Mr. Mellaire, out of his own experience, has added to my respect
+for the Horn. When he was a young man he was once eight weeks in making
+around from 50 in the Atlantic to 50 in the Pacific. Another time his
+vessel was compelled to put back twice to the Falklands for repairs.
+And still another time, in a wooden ship running back in distress to
+the Falklands, his vessel was lost in a shift of gale in the very
+entrance to Port Stanley. As he told me:
+
+“And after we’d been there a month, sir, who should come in but the old
+_Lucy Powers_. She was a sight!—her foremast clean gone out of her and
+half her spars, the old man killed from one of the spars falling on
+him, the mate with two broken arms, the second mate sick, and what was
+left of the crew at the pumps. We’d lost our ship, so my skipper took
+charge, refitted her, doubled up both crews, and we headed the other
+way around, pumping two hours in every watch clear to Honolulu.”
+
+The poor wretched chickens! Because of their ill-judged moulting they
+are quite featherless. It is a marvel that one of them survives, yet so
+far we have lost only six. Margaret keeps the kerosene stove going,
+and, though they have ceased laying, she confidently asserts that they
+are all layers and that we shall have plenty of eggs once we get fine
+weather in the Pacific.
+
+There is little use to describe these monotonous and perpetual westerly
+gales. One is very like another, and they follow so fast on one
+another’s heels that the sea never has a chance to grow calm. So long
+have we rolled and tossed about that the thought, say, of a solid,
+unmoving billiard-table is inconceivable. In previous incarnations I
+have encountered things that did not move, but . . . they were in
+previous incarnations.
+
+We have been up to the Diego Ramirez Rocks twice in the past ten days.
+At the present moment, by vague dead reckoning, we are two hundred
+miles east of them. We have been hove down to our hatches three times
+in the last week. We have had six stout sails, of the heaviest canvas,
+furled and double-gasketed, torn loose and stripped from the yards.
+Sometimes, so weak are our men, not more than half of them can respond
+to the call for all hands.
+
+Lars Jacobson, who had his leg broken early in the voyage, was knocked
+down by a sea several days back and had the leg rebroken. Ditman
+Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian, went Berserker last night in the
+second dog-watch and pretty well cleaned out his half of the
+forecastle. Wada reports that it required the bricklayers, Fitzgibbon
+and Gilder, the Maltese Cockney, and Steve Roberts, the cowboy, finally
+to subdue the madman. These are all men of Mr. Mellaire’s watch. In Mr.
+Pike’s watch John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum, who has stood out
+against the gangsters, has at last succumbed and joined them. And only
+this morning Mr. Pike dragged Charles Davis by the scruff of the neck
+out of the forecastle, where he had caught him expounding sea-law to
+the miserable creatures. Mr. Mellaire, I notice on occasion, remains
+unduly intimate with the gangster clique. And yet nothing serious
+happens.
+
+And Charles Davis does not die. He seems actually to be gaining in
+weight. He never misses a meal. From the break of the poop, in the
+shelter of the weather cloth, our decks a thunder and rush of freezing
+water, I often watch him slip out of his room between seas, mug and
+plate in hand, and hobble for’ard to the galley for his food. He is a
+keen judge of the ship’s motions, for never yet have I seen him get a
+serious ducking. Sometimes, of course, he may get splattered with spray
+or wet to the knees, but he manages to be out of the way whenever a big
+graybeard falls on board.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII.
+
+
+A wonderful event to-day! For five minutes, at noon, the sun was
+actually visible. But such a sun!—a pale and cold and sickly orb that
+at meridian was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon. And
+within the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the snow-gusts
+of a fresh south-west gale.
+
+_Whatever you do_, _make westing_! _make westing_!—this sailing rule of
+the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron. I can
+understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
+sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a boat.
+Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around from east
+to west.
+
+And we make easting! This west wind is eternal. I listen incredulously
+when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when easterly winds have
+blown in these latitudes. It is impossible. Always does the west wind
+blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting, else why the “Great West
+Wind Drift” printed on the charts! We of the afterguard are weary of
+this eternal buffeting. Our men have become pulpy, washed-out,
+sore-corroded shadows of men. I should not be surprised, in the end, to
+see Captain West turn tail and run eastward around the world to
+Seattle. But Margaret smiles with surety, and nods her head, and
+affirms that her father will win around to 50 in the Pacific.
+
+How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room of
+iron in the ’midship-house is beyond me—just as it is beyond me that
+the wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down in
+their bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of the
+watches.
+
+Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty miles
+due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a driving
+gale, on the port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even Mr. Pike
+acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters he has ever
+experienced.
+
+In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64
+degrees or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a
+favouring spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the
+extreme-narrowing wedges of longitude. But of late years all
+shipmasters have accepted the hugging of the land all the way around.
+Out of ten times ten thousand passages of Cape Stiff from east to west,
+this, they have concluded, is the best strategy. So Captain West hugs
+the land. He heaves-to on the port tack until the leeward drift brings
+the land into perilous proximity, then wears ship and heaves-to on the
+port tack and makes leeway off shore.
+
+I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
+frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it. In my brain burns
+the flame of a great discovery and a great achievement. I have found
+what makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
+philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make. I have
+found the love of woman. I do not know whether she cares for me. Nor is
+that the point. The point is that in myself I have risen to the
+greatest height to which the human male animal can rise.
+
+I know a woman and her name is Margaret. She is Margaret, a woman and
+desirable. My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so proudly
+deemed myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the books. As for
+De Casseres—if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I
+shall confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the
+schools. Love is the final word. To the rational man it alone gives the
+super-rational sanction for living. Like Bergson in his overhanging
+heaven of intuition, or like one who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and
+seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod the materialistic dictums of
+science underfoot, scaled the last peak of philosophy, and leaped into
+my heaven, which, after all, is within myself. The stuff that composes
+me, that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme realization in the
+love of woman. It is the vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages
+of being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty of
+flesh and breath.
+
+And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know what
+women are. And I know Margaret for what she is—mere woman; and yet I
+know, in the lover’s soul of me, that she is somehow different. Her
+ways are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are
+delightful to me. In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-builder,
+for of a surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways. And who shall
+say which is the worthier—the writing of a whole library or the
+building of a nest?
+
+The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by. It is now
+a month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are, not so
+well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a hundred
+miles south of the Straits of Le Maire. Even this position is
+conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the leeway of
+a ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with always the
+Great West Wind Drift making against us. It is four days since our last
+instrument-sight of the sun.
+
+This storm-vexed ocean has become populous. No ships are getting round,
+and each day adds to our number. Never a brief day passes without our
+sighting from two or three to a dozen hove-to on port tack or starboard
+tack. Captain West estimates there must be at least two hundred sail of
+us. A ship hove-to with preventer tackles on the rudder-head is
+unmanageable. Each night we take our chance of unavoidable and
+disastrous collision. And at times, glimpsed through the snow-squalls,
+we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive past us with the
+West Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs. And so wild is the
+mind of man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still aver that on occasion
+they have known gales to blow ships from east to west around the Horn.
+It surely has been a year since we of the _Elsinore_ emerged from under
+the lee of Tierra Del Fuego into the snorting south-west gales. A
+century, at least, has elapsed since we sailed from Baltimore.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And I don’t give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of
+this dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth. I have told Margaret that I
+love her. The tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth, where
+we clung together in the second dog-watch last evening. And it was told
+again, and by both of us, in the bright-lighted chart-room after the
+watches had been changed at eight bells. Yes, and her face was
+storm-bright, and all of her was very proud, save that her eyes were
+warm and soft and fluttered with lids that just would flutter maidenly
+and womanly. It was a great hour—our great hour.
+
+A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved. Grievous
+indeed must be the fate of the lover who is unloved. And I, for one,
+and for still other reasons, congratulate myself upon the vastitude of
+my good fortune. For see, were Margaret any other sort of a woman, were
+she . . . well, just the lovely and lovable and adorably snuggly sort
+who seem made just precisely for love and loving and nestling into the
+strong arms of a man—why, there wouldn’t be anything remarkable or
+wonderful about her loving me. But Margaret is Margaret, strong,
+self-possessed, serene, controlled, a very mistress of herself. And
+there’s the miracle—that such a woman should have been awakened to love
+by me. It is almost unbelievable. I go out of my way to get another
+peep into those long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting
+soft as she looks at me. She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank
+the Lord I am no Romeo. And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and
+under my breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the
+graybeards thundering down on us, that I am a lover. And I send
+messages to the lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a
+lover. And I look at the wretched sailors crawling along the
+spray-swept bridge and know that never in ten thousand wretched lives
+could they experience the love I experience, and I wonder why God ever
+made them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+“And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start,” Margaret
+confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from my
+arms, “was that I would not permit you to make love to me.”
+
+“True daughter of Herodias,” I gaily gibed, “so such was the drift of
+your thoughts even as early as the very start. Already you were looking
+upon me with a considerative female eye.”
+
+She laughed proudly, and did not reply.
+
+“What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
+you?” I insisted.
+
+“Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages,” she
+replied.
+
+“Then others have . . . ?”
+
+“They always do,” she assured me gravely.
+
+And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but I
+laughed it away and retorted:
+
+“It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as having
+said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered, namely, that a
+woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of him.”
+
+“Wretch!” she cried. “I never fluttered. When did I ever flutter!”
+
+“It is a delicate subject . . . ” I began with assumed hesitancy.
+
+“When did I ever flutter?” she demanded.
+
+I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer’s ruses by making a shift.
+
+“From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to miss
+observing,” I charged. “I’ll wager you knew as quickly as I the very
+instant when I first loved you.”
+
+“I knew the first time you hated me,” she evaded.
+
+“Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were coming
+on the voyage,” I said. “But now I repeat my challenge. You knew as
+quickly as I the first instant I loved you.”
+
+Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
+tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a low,
+quiet voice said:
+
+“Yes, I . . . I think I know. It was the morning of that pampero off
+the Plate, when you were thrown through the door into my father’s
+stateroom. I saw it in your eyes. I knew it. I think it was the first
+time, the very instant.”
+
+I could only nod my head and draw her close to me. And she looked up at
+me and added:
+
+“You were very ridiculous. There you sat, on the bed, holding on with
+one hand and nursing the other hand under your arm, staring at me,
+irritated, startled, utterly foolish, and then . . . how, I don’t know
+. . . I knew that you had just come to know . . . ”
+
+“And the very next instant you froze up,” I charged ungallantly.
+
+“And that was why,” she admitted shamelessly, then leaned away from me,
+her hands resting on my shoulders, while she gurgled and her lips
+parted from over her beautiful white teeth.
+
+One thing I, John Pathurst, know: that gurgling laughter of hers is the
+most adorable laughter that was ever heard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+
+
+I wonder. I wonder. Did the Samurai make a mistake? Or was it the
+darkness of oncoming death that chilled and clouded that star-cool
+brain of his, and made a mock of all his wisdom? Or was it the blunder
+that brought death upon him beforehand? I do not know, I shall never
+know; for it is a matter no one of us dreams of hinting at, much less
+discussing.
+
+I shall begin at the beginning—yesterday afternoon. For it was
+yesterday afternoon, five weeks to a day since we emerged from the
+Straits of Le Maire into this gray storm-ocean, that once again we
+found ourselves hove to directly off the Horn. At the changing of the
+watches at four o’clock, Captain West gave the command to Mr. Pike to
+wear ship. We were on the starboard tack at the time, making leeway off
+shore. This manoeuvre placed us on the port tack, and the consequent
+leeway, to me, seemed on shore, though at an acute angle, to be sure.
+
+In the chart-room, glancing curiously at the chart, I measured the
+distance with my eye and decided that we were in the neighbourhood of
+fifteen miles off Cape Horn.
+
+“With our drift we’ll be close up under the land by morning, won’t we?”
+I ventured tentatively.
+
+“Yes,” Captain West nodded; “and if it weren’t for the West Wind Drift,
+and if the land did not trend to the north-east, we’d be ashore by
+morning. As it is, we’ll be well under it at daylight, ready to steal
+around if there is a change, ready to wear ship if there is no change.”
+
+It did not enter my head to question his judgment. What he said had to
+be. Was he not the Samurai?
+
+And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr.
+Pike enter the chart-house. After several paces up and down, and a
+brief pause to watch Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth from
+lee to weather, I strolled aft to the chart-house. Prompted by I know
+not what, I peeped through one of the glass ports.
+
+There stood Mr. Pike, his sou’wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
+rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in hand,
+bent over the chart. It was the expression of his face that startled
+me. The habitual sourness had vanished. All that I could see was
+anxiety and apprehension . . . yes, and age. I had never seen him look
+so old; for there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage and weariness
+of all his sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-staring.
+
+I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of
+the poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and spray
+in the conjectural direction of our drift. Somewhere, there, in the
+north-east and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks upon
+which the graybeards thundered. And there, in the chart-room, a
+redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and
+calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position and our
+drift.
+
+And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman who
+was weak and wrong. Age was beginning to tell upon him at last, which
+could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that no man in
+ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.
+
+I laughed at my moment’s qualm of foolishness and went below, well
+content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father’s wisdom.
+Of course he was right. He had proved himself right too often already
+on the long voyage from Baltimore.
+
+At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait. He took no part whatever in the
+conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
+without—to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
+jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the
+smash and crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron walls.
+
+Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too
+discreet to question him then, or afterwards alone, about his trouble.
+At eight he went on deck again to take the watch till midnight, and as
+I went to bed I dismissed all forebodings and speculated as to how many
+more voyages he could last after this sudden onslaught of old age.
+
+I fell asleep quickly, and awoke at midnight, my lamp still burning,
+Conrad’s _Mirror of the Sea_ on my breast where it had dropped from my
+hands. I heard the watches change, and was wide awake and reading when
+Mr. Pike came below by the booby-hatch and passed down my hall by my
+open door, on his way to his room.
+
+In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a
+cigarette. Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the cigarette
+was lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his lungs.
+
+At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad’s delightful chapter, “The
+Weight of the Burden,” I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall.
+
+Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-booted,
+oilskinned, sou’westered. It was his watch below, and his sleep was
+meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on deck.
+
+I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that
+somewhere up above he was staring into the driving dark. I dressed
+fully, in all my heavy storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou’-wester to
+sheepskin under my oilskin coat. At the foot of the stairs I noted
+along the hall that Margaret’s light was burning. I peeped in—she keeps
+her door open for ventilation—and found her reading.
+
+“Merely not sleepy,” she assured me.
+
+Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension. She does
+not know even now, I am confident, the Samurai’s blunder—if blunder it
+was. As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although there is no
+telling in what occult ways she may have received though not recognized
+Mr. Pike’s anxiety.
+
+At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the
+lee door of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room. On the
+couch, lying on his back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought, slept
+Captain West. The room was warm from the ascending heat of the cabin,
+so that he lay unblanketed, fully dressed save for oilskins and boots.
+He breathed easily and steadily, and the lean, ascetic lines of his
+face seemed softened by the light of the low-turned lamp. And that one
+glance restored to me all my surety and faith in his wisdom, so that I
+laughed at myself for having left my warm bed for a freezing trip on
+deck.
+
+Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr. Mellaire.
+He was wide awake, but under no strain. Evidently it had not entered
+his mind to consider, much less question, the manoeuvre of wearing ship
+the previous afternoon.
+
+“The gale is breaking,” he told me, waving his mittened hand at a
+starry segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds.
+
+But where was Mr. Pike? Did the second mate know he was on deck? I
+proceeded to feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along the
+mad poop toward the wheel. I talked about the difficulty of sleeping in
+stormy weather, stated the restlessness and semi-insomnia that the
+violent motion of the ship caused in me, and raised the query of how
+bad weather affected the officers.
+
+“I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping like
+a baby,” I concluded.
+
+We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.
+
+“Trust us to sleep just the same way, Mr. Pathurst,” the second mate
+laughed. “The harder the weather the harder the demand on us, and the
+harder we sleep. I’m dead the moment my head touches the pillow. It
+takes Mr. Pike longer, because he always finishes his cigarette after
+he turns in. But he smokes while he’s undressing, so that he doesn’t
+require more than a minute to go deado. I’ll wager he hasn’t moved,
+right now, since ten minutes after twelve.”
+
+So the second mate did not dream the first was even on deck. I went
+below to make sure. A small sea-lamp was burning in Mr. Pike’s room,
+and I saw his bunk unoccupied. I went in by the big stove in the
+dining-room and warmed up, then again came on deck. I did not go near
+the weather cloth, where I was certain Mr. Mellaire was; but, keeping
+along the lee of the poop, I gained the bridge and started for’ard.
+
+I was in no hurry, so I paused often in that cold, wet journey. The
+gale was breaking, for again and again the stars glimmered through the
+thinning storm-clouds. On the ’midship-house was no Mr. Pike. I crossed
+it, stung by the freezing, flying spray, and carefully reconnoitred the
+top of the for’ard-house, where, in such bad weather, I knew the
+lookout was stationed. I was within twenty feet of them, when a wider
+clearance of starry sky showed me the figures of the lookout, whoever
+he was, and of Mr. Pike, side by side. Long I watched them, not making
+my presence known, and I knew that the old mate’s eyes were boring like
+gimlets into the windy darkness that separated the _Elsinore_ from the
+thunder-surfed iron coast he sought to find.
+
+Coming back to the poop I was caught by the surprised Mr. Mellaire.
+
+“Thought you were asleep, sir,” he chided.
+
+“I’m too restless,” I explained. “I’ve read until my eyes are tired,
+and now I’m trying to get chilled so that I can fall asleep while
+warming up in my blankets.”
+
+“I envy you, sir,” he answered. “Think of it! So much of all night in
+that you cannot sleep. Some day, if ever I make a lucky strike, I shall
+make a voyage like this as a passenger, and have all watches below.
+Think of it! All blessed watches below! And I shall, like you, sir,
+bring a Jap servant along, and I’ll make him call me at every changing
+of the watches, so that, wide awake, I can appreciate my good fortune
+in the several minutes before I roll over and go to sleep again.”
+
+We laughed good night to each other. Another peep into the chart-room
+showed me Captain West sleeping as before. He had not moved in general,
+though all his body moved with every roll and fling of the ship. Below,
+Margaret’s light still burned, but a peep showed her asleep, her book
+fallen from her hands just as was the so frequent case with my books.
+
+And I wondered. Half the souls of us on the _Elsinore_ slept. The
+Samurai slept. Yet the old first mate, who should have slept, kept a
+bitter watch on the for’ard-house. Was his anxiety right? Could it be
+right? Or was it the crankiness of ultimate age? Were we drifting and
+leewaying to destruction? Or was it merely an old man being struck down
+by senility in the midst of his life-task?
+
+Too wide awake to think of sleeping, I ensconced myself with _The
+Mirror of the Sea_ at the dining-table. Nor did I remove aught of my
+storm-gear save the soggy mittens, which I wrung out and hung to dry by
+the stove. Four bells struck, and six bells, and Mr. Pike had not
+returned below. At eight bells, with the changing of the watches, it
+came upon me what a night of hardship the old mate was enduring. Eight
+to twelve had been his own watch on deck. He had now completed the four
+hours of the second mate’s watch and was beginning his own watch, which
+would last till eight in the morning—twelve consecutive hours in a Cape
+Horn gale with the mercury at freezing.
+
+Next—for I had dozed—I heard loud cries above my head that were
+repeated along the poop. I did not know till afterwards that it was Mr.
+Pike’s command to hard-up the helm, passed along from for’ard by the
+men he had stationed at intervals on the bridge.
+
+All that I knew at this shock of waking was that something was
+happening above. As I pulled on my steaming mittens and hurried my best
+up the reeling stairs, I could hear the stamp of men’s feet that for
+once were not lagging. In the chart-house hall I heard Mr. Pike, who
+had already covered the length of the bridge from the for’ard-house,
+shouting:
+
+“Mizzen-braces! Slack, damn you! Slack on the run! But hold a turn!
+Aft, here, all of you! Jump! Lively, if you don’t want to swim! Come
+in, port-braces! Don’t let ’m get away! Lee-braces!—if you lose that
+turn I’ll split your skull! Lively! Lively!—Is that helm hard over! Why
+in hell don’t you answer?”
+
+All this I heard as I dashed for the lee door and as I wondered why I
+did not hear the Samurai’s voice.
+
+Then, as I passed the chart-room door, I saw him.
+
+He was sitting on the couch, white-faced, one sea-boot in his hands,
+and I could have sworn his hands were shaking. That much I saw, and the
+next moment was out on deck.
+
+At first, just emerged from the light, I could see nothing, although I
+could hear men at the pin-rails and the mate snarling and shouting
+commands. But I knew the manoeuvre. With a weak crew, in the big,
+tail-end sea of a broken gale, breakers and destruction under her lee,
+the _Elsinore_ was being worn around. We had been under lower-topsails
+and a reefed foresail all night. Mr. Pike’s first action, after putting
+the wheel up, had been to square the mizzen-yards. With the
+wind-pressure thus eased aft, the stern could more easily swing against
+the wind while the wind-pressure on the for’ard-sails paid the bow off.
+
+But it takes time to wear a ship, under short canvas, in a big sea.
+Slowly, very slowly, I could feel the direction of the wind altering
+against my cheek. The moon, dim at first, showed brighter and brighter
+as the last shreds of a flying cloud drove away from before it. In vain
+I looked for any land.
+
+“Main-braces!—all of you!—jump!” Mr. Pike shouted, himself leading the
+rush along the poop. And the men really rushed. Not in all the months I
+had observed them had I seen such swiftness of energy.
+
+I made my way to the wheel, where Tom Spink stood. He did not notice
+me. With one hand holding the idle wheel, he was leaning out to one
+side, his eyes fixed in a fascinated stare. I followed its direction,
+on between the chart-house and the port-jigger shrouds, and on across a
+mountain sea that was very vague in the moonlight. And then I saw it!
+The _Elsinore’s_ stern was flung skyward, and across that cold ocean I
+saw land—black rocks and snow-covered slopes and crags. And toward this
+land the _Elsinore_, now almost before the wind, was driving.
+
+From the ’midship-house came the snarls of the mate and the cries of
+the sailors. They were pulling and hauling for very life. Then came Mr.
+Pike, across the poop, leaping with incredible swiftness, sending his
+snarl before him.
+
+“Ease that wheel there! What the hell you gawkin’ at? Steady her as I
+tell you. That’s all you got to do!”
+
+From for’ard came a cry, and I knew Mr. Mellaire was on top of the
+for’ard-house and managing the fore-yards.
+
+“Now!”—from Mr. Pike. “More spokes! Steady! Steady! And be ready to
+check her!”
+
+He bounded away along the poop again, shouting for men for the
+mizzen-braces. And the men appeared, some of his watch, others of the
+second mate’s watch, routed from sleep—men coatless, and hatless, and
+bootless; men ghastly-faced with fear but eager for once to spring to
+the orders of the man who knew and could save their miserable lives
+from miserable death. Yes—and I noted the delicate-handed cook, and
+Yatsuda, the sail-maker, pulling with his one unparalysed hand. It was
+all hands to save ship, and all hands knew it. Even Sundry Buyers, who
+had drifted aft in his stupidity instead of being for’ard with his own
+officer, forebore to stare about and to press his abdomen. For the
+nonce he pulled like a youngling of twenty.
+
+The moon covered again, and it was in darkness that the _Elsinore_
+rounded up on the wind on the starboard tack. This, in her case, under
+lower-topsails only, meant that she lay eight points from the wind, or,
+in land terms, at right angles to the wind.
+
+Mr. Pike was splendid, marvellous. Even as the _Elsinore_ was rounding
+to on the wind, while the head-yards were still being braced, and even
+as he was watching the ship’s behaviour and the wheel, in between his
+commands to Tom Spink of “A spoke! A spoke or two! Another! Steady!
+Hold her! Ease her!” he was ordering the men aloft to loose sail. I had
+thought, the manoeuvre of wearing achieved, that we were saved, but
+this setting of all three upper-topsails unconvinced me.
+
+The moon remained hidden, and to leeward nothing could be seen. As each
+sail was set, the _Elsinore_ was pressed farther and farther over, and
+I realized that there was plenty of wind left, despite the fact that
+the gale had broken or was breaking. Also, under this additional
+canvas, I could feel the _Elsinore_ moving through the water. Pike now
+sent the Maltese Cockney to help Tom Spink at the wheel. As for
+himself, he took his stand beside the booby-hatch, where he could gauge
+the _Elsinore_, gaze to leeward, and keep his eye on the helmsmen.
+
+“Full and by,” was his reiterated command. “Keep her a good full—a
+rap-full; but don’t let her fall away. Hold her to it, and drive her.”
+
+He took no notice whatever of me, although I, on my way to the lee of
+the chart-house, stood at his shoulder a full minute, offering him a
+chance to speak. He knew I was there, for his big shoulder brushed my
+arm as he swayed and turned to warn the helmsmen in the one breath to
+hold her up to it but to keep her full. He had neither time nor
+courtesy for a passenger in such a moment.
+
+Sheltering by the chart-house, I saw the moon appear. It grew brighter
+and brighter, and I saw the land, dead to leeward of us, not three
+hundred yards away. It was a cruel sight—black rock and bitter snow,
+with cliffs so perpendicular that the _Elsinore_ could have laid
+alongside of them in deep water, with great gashes and fissures, and
+with great surges thundering and spouting along all the length of it.
+
+Our predicament was now clear to me. We had to weather the bight of
+land and islands into which we had drifted, and sea and wind worked
+directly on shore. The only way out was to drive through the water, to
+drive fast and hard, and this was borne in upon me by Mr. Pike bounding
+past to the break of the poop, where I heard him shout to Mr. Mellaire
+to set the mainsail.
+
+Evidently the second mate was dubious, for the next cry of Mr. Pike’s
+was:
+
+“Damn the reef! You’d be in hell first! Full mainsail! All hands to
+it!”
+
+The difference was appreciable at once when that huge spread of canvas
+opposed the wind. The _Elsinore_ fairly leaped and quivered as she
+sprang to it, and I could feel her eat to windward as she at the same
+time drove faster ahead. Also, in the rolls and gusts, she was forced
+down till her lee-rail buried and the sea foamed level across to her
+hatches. Mr. Pike watched her like a hawk, and like certain death he
+watched the Maltese Cockney and Tom Spink at the wheel.
+
+“Land on the lee bow!” came a cry from for’ard, that was carried on
+from mouth to mouth along the bridge to the poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Pike nod his head grimly and sarcastically. He had already
+seen it from the lee-poop, and what he had not seen he had guessed. A
+score of times I saw him test the weight of the gusts on his cheek and
+with all the brain of him study the _Elsinore’s_ behaviour. And I knew
+what was in his mind. Could she carry what she had? Could she carry
+more?
+
+Small wonder, in this tense passage of time, that I had forgotten the
+Samurai. Nor did I remember him until the chart-house door swung open
+and I caught him by the arm. He steadied and swayed beside me, while he
+watched that cruel picture of rock and snow and spouting surf.
+
+“A good full!” Mr. Pike snarled. “Or I’ll eat your heart out. God damn
+you for the farmer’s hound you are, Tom Spink! Ease her! Ease her! Ease
+her into the big ones, damn you! Don’t let her head fall off! Steady!
+Where in hell did you learn to steer? What cow-farm was you raised on?”
+
+Here he bounded for’ard past us with those incredible leaps of his.
+
+“It would be good to set the mizzen-topgallant,” I heard Captain West
+mutter in a weak, quavery voice. “Mr. Pathurst, will you please tell
+Mr. Pike to set the mizzen-topgallant?”
+
+And at that very instant Mr. Pike’s voice rang out from the break of
+the poop:
+
+“Mr. Mellaire!—the mizzen-topgallant!”
+
+Captain West’s head drooped until his chin rested on his breast, and so
+low did he mutter that I leaned to hear.
+
+“A very good officer,” he said. “An excellent officer. Mr. Pathurst, if
+you will kindly favour me, I should like to go in. I . . . I haven’t
+got on my boots.”
+
+The muscular feat was to open the heavy iron door and hold it open in
+the rolls and plunges. This I accomplished; but when I had helped
+Captain West across the high threshold he thanked me and waived further
+services. And I did not know even then he was dying.
+
+Never was a Blackwood ship driven as was the _Elsinore_ during the next
+half-hour. The full-jib was also set, and, as it departed in shreds,
+the fore-topmast staysail was being hoisted. For’ard of the
+’midship-house it was made unlivable by the bursting seas. Mr.
+Mellaire, with half the crew, clung on somehow on top the
+’midship-house, while the rest of the crew was with us in the
+comparative safety of the poop. Even Charles Davis, drenched and
+shivering, hung on beside me to the brass ring-handle of the
+chart-house door.
+
+Such sailing! It was a madness of speed and motion, for the _Elsinore_
+drove over and through and under those huge graybeards that thundered
+shore-ward. There were times, when rolls and gusts worked against her
+at the same moment, when I could have sworn the ends of her
+lower-yardarms swept the sea.
+
+It was one chance in ten that we could claw off. All knew it, and all
+knew there was nothing more to do but await the issue. And we waited in
+silence. The only voice was that of the mate, intermittently cursing,
+threatening, and ordering Tom Spink and the Maltese Cockney at the
+wheel. Between whiles, and all the while, he gauged the gusts, and ever
+his eyes lifted to the main-topgallant-yard. He wanted to set that one
+more sail. A dozen times I saw him half-open his mouth to give the
+order he dared not give. And as I watched him, so all watched him.
+Hard-bitten, bitter-natured, sour-featured and snarling-mouthed, he was
+the one man, the henchman of the race, the master of the moment. “And
+where,” was my thought, “O where was the Samurai?”
+
+One chance in ten? It was one in a hundred as we fought to weather the
+last bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and
+open ocean. So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling
+skysail-yards strike the face of the rock. So close were we, no more
+than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank down into
+the last great trough between two seas I can swear every one of us held
+breath and waited for the _Elsinore_ to strike.
+
+Instead we drove free. And as if in very rage at our escape, the storm
+took that moment to deal us the mightiest buffet of all. The mate felt
+that monster sea coming, for he sprang to the wheel ere the blow fell.
+I looked for’ard, and I saw all for’ard blotted out by the mountain of
+water that fell aboard. The _Elsinore_ righted from the shock and
+reappeared to the eye, full of water from rail to rail. Then a gust
+caught her sails and heeled her over, spilling half the enormous burden
+outboard again.
+
+Along the bridge came the relayed cry of “Man overboard!”
+
+I glanced at the mate, who had just released the wheel to the helmsmen.
+He shook his head, as if irritated by so trivial a happening, walked to
+the corner of the half-wheelhouse, and stared at the coast he had
+escaped, white and black and cold in the moonlight.
+
+Mr. Mellaire came aft, and they met beside me in the lee of the
+chart-house.
+
+“All hands, Mr. Mellaire,” the mate said, “and get the mainsail off of
+her. After that, the mizzen-topgallant.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said the second.
+
+“Who was it?” the mate asked, as Mr. Mellaire was turning away.
+
+“Boney—he was no good, anyway,” came the answer.
+
+That was all. Boney the Splinter was gone, and all hands were answering
+the command of Mr. Mellaire to take in the mainsail. But they never
+took it in; for at that moment it started to blow away out of the
+bolt-ropes, and in but few moments all that was left of it was a few
+short, slatting ribbons.
+
+“Mizzen-topgallant-sail!” Mr. Pike ordered. Then, and for the first
+time, he recognized my existence.
+
+“Well rid of it,” he growled. “It never did set properly. I was always
+aching to get my hands on the sail-maker that made it.”
+
+On my way below a glance into the chart-room gave me the cue to the
+Samurai’s blunder—if blunder it can be called, for no one will ever
+know. He lay on the floor in a loose heap, rolling willy-nilly with
+every roll of the _Elsinore_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+
+There is so much to write about all at once. In the first place,
+Captain West. Not entirely unexpected was his death. Margaret tells me
+that she was apprehensive from the start of the voyage—and even before.
+It was because of her apprehension that she so abruptly changed her
+plans and accompanied her father.
+
+What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that it
+was some stroke of the heart. And yet, after the stroke, did he not
+come out on deck? Or could the first stroke have been followed by
+another and fatal one after I had helped him inside through the door?
+And even so, I have never heard of a heart-stroke being preceded hours
+before by a weakening of the mind. Captain West’s mind seemed quite
+clear, and must have been quite clear, that last afternoon when he wore
+the _Elsinore_ and started the lee-shore drift. In which case it was a
+blunder. The Samurai blundered, and his heart destroyed him when he
+became aware of the blunder.
+
+At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret’s head. She
+accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the oncoming
+termination of his sickness. And no one will ever undeceive her.
+Neither Mr. Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention a
+whisper of what so narrowly missed causing disaster. In fact, Mr. Pike
+does not talk about the matter at all.—And then, again, might it not
+have been something different from heart disease? Or heart disease
+complicated with something else that obscured his mind that afternoon
+before his death? Well, no one knows, and I, for one, shall not sit,
+even in secret judgment, on the event.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the _Elsinore_ was
+rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of
+miles off the land. Captain West was buried at four o’clock, and at
+eight bells that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few
+remarks to both watches. They were straight-from-the-shoulder remarks,
+or, as he called them, they were “brass tacks.”
+
+Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss, and
+that they would toe the mark as they never had before. Up to this time
+they had been loafing in an hotel, but from this time on they were
+going to work.
+
+“On this hooker, from now on,” he perorated, “it’s going to be like old
+times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as well as the
+first. And God help the man that don’t jump. That’s all. Relieve the
+wheel and lookout.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition. I don’t see how
+they can jump. Another week of westerly gales, alternating with brief
+periods of calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off the Horn.
+So weak are the men that they have no spirit left in them—not even the
+gangsters. And so afraid are they of the mate that they really do their
+best to jump when he drives them, and he drives them all the time. Mr.
+Mellaire shakes his head.
+
+“Wait till they get around and up into better weather,” he astonished
+me by telling me the other afternoon. “Wait till they get dried out,
+and rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more flesh
+on their bones, and more spunk in their blood—then they won’t stand for
+this driving. Mr. Pike can’t realize that times have changed, sir, and
+laws have changed, and men have changed. He’s an old man, and I know
+what I am talking about.”
+
+“You mean you’ve been listening to the talk of the men?” I challenged
+rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this ship’s
+officer.
+
+The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of
+light vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching, fearful
+thing that lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to leap out at
+me, while the cruel gash of mouth drew thinner and crueller. And at the
+same time, on my inner sight, was grotesquely limned a picture of a
+brain pulsing savagely against the veneer of skin that covered that
+cleft of skull beneath the dripping sou’-wester. Then he controlled
+himself, the mouth-gash relaxed, and the suave and gentle film drew
+again across the eyes.
+
+“I mean, sir,” he said softly, “that I am speaking out of a long sea
+experience. Times have changed. The old driving days are gone. And I
+trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the matter,
+nor misinterpret what I have said.”
+
+Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I
+could not ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the talk
+of the men. And yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is a good
+sailorman and second mate save for his unholy intimacy with the men
+for’ard—an intimacy which even the Chinese cook and the Chinese steward
+deplore as unseamanlike and perilous.
+
+Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that
+they have no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest
+for’ard who will not die, and who are as spunky as ever. They are Andy
+Fay, Mulligan Jacobs, and Charles Davis. What strange, abysmal vitality
+informs them is beyond all speculation. Of course, Charles Davis should
+have been overside with a sack of coal at his feet long ago. And Andy
+Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only, and have always been, wrecked and
+emaciated wisps of men. Yet far stronger men than they have gone over
+the side, and far stronger men than they are laid up right now in
+absolute physical helplessness in the soggy forecastle bunks. And these
+two bitter flames of shreds of things stand all their watches and
+answer all calls for both watches.
+
+Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in
+them. Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed dripping
+on occasion by the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight through
+canvas tarpaulins, nevertheless not a chicken has died. Is it a matter
+of selection? Are these the iron-vigoured ones that survived the
+hardships from Baltimore to the Horn, and are fitted to survive
+anything? Then for a De Vries to take them, save them, and out of them
+found the hardiest breed of chickens on the planet! And after this I
+shall always query that phrase, most ancient in our
+language—“chicken-hearted.” Measured by the _Elsinore’s_ chickens, it
+is a misnomer.
+
+Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
+topaz eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest of
+the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech, nevertheless
+they are good sailors and are always first to spring into any
+enterprise of work or peril. They have gone into Mr. Mellaire’s watch,
+and they are quite apart from the rest of the sailors. And when there
+is a delay, or wait, with nothing to do for long minutes, they shoulder
+together, and stand and sway to the heave of deck, and dream far dreams
+in those pale, topaz eyes, of a country, I am sure, where mothers, with
+pale, topaz eyes and sandy hair, birth sons and daughters that breed
+true in terms of topaz eyes and sandy hair.
+
+But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too keenly
+intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure. He is a
+shadow of his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark circles of
+suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and English
+intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as if aflame
+with fever.
+
+Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long tried
+and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit. He is whining and
+fearful. So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he is
+prideless and shameless.
+
+“I’ll never ship around the Horn again, sir,” he began on me the other
+day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel. “I’ve sworn it
+before, but this time I mean it. Never again, sir. Never again.”
+
+“Why did you swear it before?” I queried.
+
+“It was on the _Nahoma_, sir, four years ago. Two hundred and thirty
+days from Liverpool to ’Frisco. Think of it, sir. Two hundred and
+thirty days! And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
+creosote got loose. We buried the captain right here off the Horn. The
+grub gave out. Most of us nearly died of scurvy. Every man Jack of us
+was carted to hospital in ’Frisco. It was plain hell, sir, that’s what
+it was, an’ two hundred and thirty days of it.”
+
+“Yet here you are,” I laughed; “signed on another Horn voyage.”
+
+And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
+
+“If only we’d lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney.”
+
+I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered. The
+carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with
+the winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
+eternal buffeting by the Great West Wind. Nor are we alone in our
+travail on this desolate ocean. Never a day does the gray thin, or the
+snow-squalls cease that we do not sight ships, west-bound like
+ourselves, hove-to and trying to hold on to the meagre westing they
+possess. And occasionally, when the gray clears and lifts, we see a
+lucky ship, bound east, running before it and reeling off the miles. I
+saw Mr. Pike, yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at one
+such craft that flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile away.
+
+And the men are jumping. Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square
+fists of his, as many a man’s face attests. So weak are they, and so
+terrible is he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-handed.
+I cannot help but note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take part in this
+driving. Yet I know that he is a trained driver, and that he was not
+averse to driving at the outset of the voyage. But now he seems bent on
+keeping on good terms with the crew. I should like to know what Mr.
+Pike thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be blind to what is going on;
+but I am too well aware of what would happen if I raised the question.
+He would insult me, snap my head off, and indulge in a three-days’
+sea-grouch. Things are sad and monotonous enough for Margaret and me in
+the cabin and at table, without invoking the blight of the mate’s
+displeasure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+
+Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated. From now on and for always
+these imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs. We are west
+of the Diego de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at a twelve-knot
+clip with an easterly gale at our backs. And the carpenter is gone. His
+passing, and the coming of the easterly wind, were coincidental.
+
+It was yesterday morning, as he helped me to dress, that I was struck
+by the solemnity of Wada’s face. He shook his head lugubriously as he
+broke the news. The carpenter was missing. The ship had been searched
+for him high and low. There just was no carpenter.
+
+“What does the steward think?” I asked. “What does Louis think?—and
+Yatsuda?”
+
+“The sailors, they kill ’m carpenter sure,” was the answer. “Very bad
+ship this. Very bad hearts. Just the same pig, just the same dog. All
+the time kill. All the time kill. Bime-by everybody kill. You see.”
+
+The old steward, at work in his pantry, grinned at me when I mentioned
+the matter.
+
+“They make fool with me, I fix ’em,” he said vindictively. “Mebbe they
+kill me, all right; but I kill some, too.”
+
+He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his
+body, in a canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a meat
+knife of the heavy sort that butchers hack with. He drew it forth—it
+was fully two feet long—and, to demonstrate its razor-edge, sliced a
+sheet of newspaper into many ribbons.
+
+“Huh!” he laughed sardonically. “I am Chink, monkey, damn fool, eh?—no
+good, eh? all rotten damn to hell. I fix ’em, they make fool with me.”
+
+And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play. Nobody knows
+what happened to the carpenter. There are no clues, no traces. The
+night was calm and snowy. No seas broke on board. Without doubt the
+clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and dead. The
+question is: did he go over of his own accord, or was he put over?
+
+At eight o’clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches. He
+stood at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the rail
+and gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath him.
+
+Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story. They
+knew no more about it than did we—or so they averred.
+
+“I suppose you’ll be chargin’ next that I hove that big lummux
+overboard with me own hands,” Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was
+questioned. “An’ mebbe I did, bein’ that husky an’ rampagin’
+bull-like.”
+
+The mate’s face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
+passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
+
+It was an unforgettable scene—the mate in the high place, the men,
+sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted
+straight down through the windless air, while the _Elsinore_, with
+hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that
+the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering
+sucks and sobs. And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their
+hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots, their faces
+worn and sick. And the three dreamers with the topaz eyes stood and
+swayed and dreamed together, incurious of setting and situation.
+
+And then it came—the hint of easterly air. The mate noted it first. I
+saw him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible draught.
+Then I felt it. A minute longer he waited, until assured, when, the
+dead carpenter forgotten, he burst out with orders to the wheel and the
+crew. And the men jumped, though in their weakness the climb aloft was
+slow and toilsome; and when the gaskets were off the topgallant-sails
+and the men on deck were hoisting yards and sheeting home, those aloft
+were loosing the royals.
+
+While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced around,
+the _Elsinore_, her bow pointing to the west, began moving through the
+water before the first fair wind in a month and a half.
+
+Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time the
+snow fell steadily. The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to fall,
+and the breeze continued to grow upon itself. Tom Spink, passing by me
+on the poop to lend a hand at the final finicky trimming of the
+mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant look. Superstition was vindicated.
+Events had proved him right. Fair wind had come with the going of the
+carpenter, which said warlock had incontestably taken with him overside
+his bag of wind-tricks.
+
+Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was
+too disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself,
+glancing at the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern into
+the gray of snow out of which blew the favouring wind. He even paused
+beside me to gossip for a moment about the French restaurants of San
+Francisco and how, therein, the delectable California fashion of
+cooking wild duck obtained.
+
+“Throw ’em through the fire,” he chanted. “That’s the way—throw ’em
+through the fire—a hot oven, sixteen minutes—I take mine fourteen, to
+the second—an’ squeeze the carcasses.”
+
+By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff
+breeze. At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing
+gale. It was across a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting sea that made
+from eastward bucked into the West End Drift and battled and battered
+down the huge south-westerly swell. And the big grinning dolt of a
+Finnish carpenter, already food for fish and bird, was astern there
+somewhere in the freezing rack and drive.
+
+Make westing! We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of
+longitude at the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for
+two. And Mr. Pike, staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore that
+they could carry away for all he cared ere he eased an inch of canvas.
+More he did. He set the huge crojack, biggest of all sails, and
+challenged God or Satan to start a seam of it or all its seams.
+
+He simply could not go below. In such auspicious occasions all watches
+were his, and he strode the poop perpetually with all age-lag banished
+from his legs. Margaret and I were with him in the chart-room when he
+hurrahed the barometer, down to 28.55 and falling. And we were near
+him, on the poop, when he drove by an east-bound lime-juicer, hove-to
+under upper-topsails. We were a biscuit-toss away, and he sprang upon
+the rail at the jigger-shrouds and danced a war-dance and waved his
+free arm, and yelled his scorn and joy at their discomfiture to the
+several oilskinned figures on the stranger vessel’s poop.
+
+Through the pitch-black night we continued to drive. The crew was sadly
+frightened, and I sought in vain, in the two dog-watches, for Tom
+Spink, to ask him if he thought the carpenter, astern, had opened wide
+the bag-mouth and loosed all his tricks. For the first time I saw the
+steward apprehensive.
+
+“Too much,” he told me, with ominous rolling head. “Too much sail,
+rotten bad damn all to hell. Bime-by, pretty quick, all finish. You
+see.”
+
+“They talk about running the easting down,” Mr. Pike chortled to me, as
+we clung to the poop-rail to keep from fetching away and breaking ribs
+and necks. “Well, this is running your westing down if anybody should
+ride up in a go-devil and ask you.”
+
+It was a wretched, glorious night. Sleep was impossible—for me, at any
+rate. Nor was there even the comfort of warmth. Something had gone
+wrong with the big cabin stove, due to our wild running, I fancy, and
+the steward was compelled to let the fire go out. So we are getting a
+taste of the hardship of the forecastle, though in our case everything
+is dry instead of soggy or afloat. The kerosene stoves burned in our
+staterooms, but so smelly was mine that I preferred the cold.
+
+To sail on one’s nerve in an over-canvassed harbour cat-boat is all the
+excitement any glutton can desire. But to sail, in the same fashion, in
+a big ship off the Horn, is incredible and terrible. The Great West
+Wind Drift, setting squarely into the teeth of the easterly gale,
+kicked up a tideway sea that was monstrous. Two men toiled at the
+wheel, relieving in pairs every half-hour, and in the face of the cold
+they streamed with sweat long ere their half-hour shift was up.
+
+Mr. Pike is of the elder race of men. His endurance is prodigious.
+Watch and watch, and all watches, he held the poop.
+
+“I never dreamed of it,” he told me, at midnight, as the great gusts
+tore by and as we listened for our lighter spars to smash aloft and
+crash upon the deck. “I thought my last whirling sailing was past. And
+here we are! Here we are!
+
+“Lord! Lord! I sailed third mate in the little _Vampire_ before you
+were born. Fifty-six men before the mast, and the last Jack of ’em an
+able seaman. And there were eight boys, an’ bosuns that was bosuns, an’
+sail-makers an’ carpenters an’ stewards an’ passengers to jam the
+decks. An’ three driving mates of us, an’ Captain Brown, the Little
+Wonder. He didn’t weigh a hundredweight, an’ he drove us—he drove _us_,
+three drivin’ mates that learned from him what drivin’ was.
+
+“It was knock down and drag out from the start. The first hour of
+puttin’ the men to fair perished our knuckles. I’ve got the smashed
+joints yet to show. Every sea-chest broke open, every sea-bag turned
+out, and whiskey bottles, knuckle-dusters, sling-shots, bowie-knives,
+an’ guns chucked overside by the armful. An’ when we chose the watches,
+each man of fifty-six of ’em laid his knife on the main-hatch an’ the
+carpenter broke the point square off.—Yes, an’ the little _Vampire_
+only eight hundred tons. The _Elsinore_ could carry her on her deck.
+But she was ship, all ship, an’ them was men’s days.”
+
+Margaret, save for inability to sleep, did not mind the driving,
+although Mr. Mellaire, on the other hand, admitted apprehension.
+
+“He’s got my goat,” he confided to me. “It isn’t right to drive a
+cargo-carrier this way. This isn’t a ballasted yacht. It’s a coal-hulk.
+I know what driving was, but it was in ships made to drive. Our
+iron-work aloft won’t stand it. Mr. Pathurst, I tell you frankly that
+it is criminal, it is sheer murder, to run the _Elsinore_ with that
+crojack on her. You can see yourself, sir. It’s an after-sail. All its
+tendency is to throw her stern off and her bow up to it. And if it ever
+happens, sir, if she ever gets away from the wheel for two seconds and
+broaches to . . . ”
+
+“Then what?” I asked, or, rather, shouted; for all conversation had to
+be shouted close to ear in that blast of gale.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and all of him was eloquent with the
+unuttered, unmistakable word—“finish.”
+
+At eight this morning Margaret and I struggled up to the poop. And
+there was that indomitable, iron old man. He had never left the deck
+all night. His eyes were bright, and he appeared in the pink of
+well-being. He rubbed his hands and chuckled greeting to us, and took
+up his reminiscences.
+
+“In ’51, on this same stretch, Miss West, the _Flying Cloud_, in
+twenty-four hours, logged three hundred and seventy-four miles under
+her topgallant-sails. That was sailing. She broke the record, that day,
+for sail an’ steam.”
+
+“And what are we averaging, Mr. Pike?” Margaret queried, while her eyes
+were fixed on the main deck, where continually one rail and then the
+other dipped under the ocean and filled across from rail to rail, only
+to spill out and take in on the next roll.
+
+“Thirteen for a fair average since five o’clock yesterday afternoon,”
+he exulted. “In the squalls she makes all of sixteen, which is going
+some, for the _Elsinore_.”
+
+“I’d take the crojack off if I had charge,” Margaret criticised.
+
+“So would I, so would I, Miss West,” he replied; “if we hadn’t been six
+weeks already off the Horn.”
+
+She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel to
+the wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some invisible
+archer’s hands.
+
+“They’re remarkably good sticks of timber,” was her comment.
+
+“Well may you say it, Miss West,” he agreed. “I’d never a-believed
+they’d a-stood it myself. But just look at ’m! Just look at ’m!”
+
+There was no breakfast for the men. Three times the galley had been
+washed out, and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented themselves
+with hard tack and cold salt horse. Aft, with us, the steward scalded
+himself twice ere he succeeded in making coffee over a kerosene-burner.
+
+At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the
+same direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail. The only
+one of her courses set was the foresail.
+
+“The way that skipper’s carryin’ on is shocking,” Mr. Pike sneered. “He
+should be more cautious, and remember God, the owners, the
+underwriters, and the Board of Trade.”
+
+Such was our speed that in almost no time we were up with the stranger
+vessel and passing her. Mr. Pike was like a boy just loosed from
+school. He altered our course so that we passed her a hundred yards
+away. She was a gallant sight, but, such was our speed, she appeared
+standing still. Mr. Pike jumped upon the rail and insulted those on her
+poop by extending a rope’s end in invitation to take a tow.
+
+Margaret shook her head privily to me as she gazed at our bending
+royal-yards, but was caught in the act by Mr. Pike, who cried out:
+
+“What kites she won’t carry she can drag!”
+
+An hour later I caught Tom Spink, just relieved from his shift at the
+wheel and weak from exhaustion.
+
+“What do you think now of the carpenter and his bag of tricks?” I
+queried.
+
+“Lord lumme, it should a-ben the mate, sir,” was his reply.
+
+By five in the afternoon we had logged 314 miles since five the
+previous day, which was two over an average of thirteen knots for
+twenty-four consecutive hours.
+
+“Now take Captain Brown of the little _Vampire_,” Mr. Pike grinned to
+me, for our sailing made him good-natured. “He never would take in
+until the kites an’ stu’n’sails was about his ears. An’ when she was
+blown’ her worst an’ we was half-fairly shortened down, he’d turn in
+for a snooze, an’ say to us, ‘Call me if she moderates.’ Yes, and I’ll
+never forget the night when I called him an’ told him that everything
+on top the houses had gone adrift, an’ that two of the boats had been
+swept aft and was kindling-wood against the break of the cabin. ‘Very
+well, Mr. Pike,’ he says, battin’ his eyes and turnin’ over to go to
+sleep again. ‘Very well, Mr. Pike,’ says he. ‘Watch her. An’ Mr. Pike .
+. .’ ‘Yes, sir,’ says I. ‘Give me a call, Mr. Pike, when the windlass
+shows signs of comin’ aft.’ That’s what he said, his very words, an’
+the next moment, damme, he was snorin’.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+It is now midnight, and, cunningly wedged into my bunk, unable to
+sleep, I am writing these lines with flying dabs of pencil at my pad.
+And no more shall I write, I swear, until this gale is blown out, or we
+are blown to Kingdom Come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+
+The days have passed and I have broken my resolve; for here I am again
+writing while the _Elsinore_ surges along across a magnificent, smoky,
+dusty sea. But I have two reasons for breaking my word. First, and
+minor, we had a real dawn this morning. The gray of the sea showed a
+streaky blue, and the cloud-masses were actually pink-tipped by a
+really and truly sun.
+
+Second, and major, _we are around the Horn_! We are north of 50 in the
+Pacific, in Longitude 80.49, with Cape Pillar and the Straits of
+Magellan already south of east from us, and we are heading
+north-north-west. _We are around the Horn_! The profound significance
+of this can be appreciated only by one who has wind-jammed around from
+east to west. Blow high, blow low, nothing can happen to thwart us. No
+ship north of 50 was ever blown back. From now on it is plain sailing,
+and Seattle suddenly seems quite near.
+
+All the ship’s company, with the exception of Margaret, is better
+spirited. She is quiet, and a little down, though she is anything but
+prone to the wastage of grief. In her robust, vital philosophy God’s
+always in heaven. I may describe her as being merely subdued, and
+gentle, and tender. And she is very wistful to receive gentle
+consideration and tenderness from me. She is, after all, the genuine
+woman. She wants the strength that man has to give, and I flatter
+myself that I am ten times a stronger man than I was when the voyage
+began, because I am a thousand times a more human man since I told the
+books to go hang and began to revel in the human maleness of the man
+that loves a woman and is loved.
+
+Returning to the ship’s company. The rounding of the Horn, the better
+weather that is continually growing better, the easement of hardship
+and toil and danger, with the promise of the tropics and of the balmy
+south-east trades before them—all these factors contribute to pick up
+our men again. The temperature has already so moderated that the men
+are beginning to shed their surplusage of clothing, and they no longer
+wrap sacking about their sea-boots. Last evening, in the second
+dog-watch, I heard a man actually singing.
+
+The steward has discarded the huge, hacking knife and relaxed to the
+extent of engaging in an occasional sober romp with Possum. Wada’s face
+is no longer solemnly long, and Louis’ Oxford accent is more
+mellifluous than ever. Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay are the same
+venomous scorpions they have always been. The three gangsters, with the
+clique they lead, have again asserted their tyrrany and thrashed all
+the weaklings and feeblings in the forecastle. Charles Davis resolutely
+refuses to die, though how he survived that wet and freezing room of
+iron through all the weeks off the Horn has elicited wonder even from
+Mr. Pike, who has a most accurate knowledge of what men can stand and
+what they cannot stand.
+
+How Nietzsche, with his eternal slogan of “Be hard! Be hard!” would
+have delighted in Mr. Pike!
+
+And—oh!—Larry has had a tooth removed. For some days distressed with a
+jumping toothache, he came aft to the mate for relief. Mr. Pike refused
+to “monkey” with the “fangled” forceps in the medicine-chest. He used a
+tenpenny nail and a hammer in the good old way to which he was brought
+up. I vouch for this. I saw it done. One blow of the hammer and the
+tooth was out, while Larry was jumping around holding his jaw. It is a
+wonder it wasn’t fractured. But Mr. Pike avers he has removed hundreds
+of teeth by this method and never known a fractured jaw. Also, he avers
+he once sailed with a skipper who shaved every Sunday morning and never
+touched a razor, nor any cutting-edge, to his face. What he used,
+according to Mr. Pike, was a lighted candle and a damp towel. Another
+candidate for Nietzsche’s immortals who are hard!
+
+As for Mr. Pike himself, he is the highest-spirited, best-conditioned
+man on board. The driving to which he subjected the _Elsinore_ was meat
+and drink. He still rubs his hands and chuckles over the memory of it.
+
+“Huh!” he said to me, in reference to the crew; “I gave ’em a taste of
+real old-fashioned sailing. They’ll never forget this hooker—at least
+them that don’t take a sack of coal overside before we reach port.”
+
+“You mean you think we’ll have more sea-burials?” I inquired.
+
+He turned squarely upon me, and squarely looked me in the eyes for the
+matter of five long seconds.
+
+“Huh!” he replied, as he turned on his heel. “Hell ain’t begun to pop
+on this hooker.”
+
+He still stands his mate’s watch, alternating with Mr. Mellaire, for he
+is firm in his conviction that there is no man for’ard fit to stand a
+second mate’s watch. Also, he has kept his old quarters. Perhaps it is
+out of delicacy for Margaret; for I have learned that it is the
+invariable custom for the mate to occupy the captain’s quarters when
+the latter dies. So Mr. Mellaire still eats by himself in the big
+after-room, as he has done since the loss of the carpenter, and bunks
+as before in the ’midship-house with Nancy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+
+Mr. Mellaire was right. The men would not accept the driving when the
+_Elsinore_ won to easier latitudes. Mr. Pike was right. Hell had not
+begun to pop. But it has popped now, and men are overboard without even
+the kindliness of a sack of coal at their feet. And yet the men, though
+ripe for it, did not precipitate the trouble. It was Mr. Mellaire. Or,
+rather, it was Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian. Perhaps it was
+Possum. At any rate, it was an accident, in which the several-named,
+including Possum, played their respective parts.
+
+To begin at the beginning. Two weeks have elapsed since we crossed 50,
+and we are now in 37—the same latitude as San Francisco, or, to be
+correct, we are as far south of the equator as San Francisco is north
+of it. The trouble was precipitated yesterday morning shortly after
+nine o’clock, and Possum started the chain of events that culminated in
+downright mutiny. It was Mr. Mellaire’s watch, and he was standing on
+the bridge, directly under the mizzen-top, giving orders to Sundry
+Buyers, who, with Arthur Deacon and the Maltese Cockney, was doing
+rigging work aloft.
+
+Get the picture and the situation in all its ridiculousness. Mr. Pike,
+thermometer in hand, was coming back along the bridge from taking the
+temperature of the coal in the for’ard hold. Ditman Olansen was just
+swinging into the mizzen-top as he went up with several turns of rope
+over one shoulder. Also, in some way, to the end of this rope was
+fastened a sizable block that might have weighed ten pounds. Possum,
+running free, was fooling around the chicken-coop on top the
+’midship-house. And the chickens, featherless but indomitable, were
+enjoying the milder weather as they pecked at the grain and grits which
+the steward had just placed in their feeding-trough. The tarpaulin that
+covered their pen had been off for several days.
+
+Now observe. I am at the break of the poop, leaning on the rail and
+watching Ditman Olansen swing into the top with his cumbersome burden.
+Mr. Pike, proceeding aft, has just passed Mr. Mellaire. Possum, who, on
+account of the Horn weather and the tarpaulin, has not seen the
+chickens for many weeks, is getting reacquainted, and is investigating
+them with that keen nose of his. And a hen’s beak, equally though
+differently keen, impacts on Possum’s nose, which is as sensitive as it
+is keen.
+
+I may well say, now that I think it over, that it was this particular
+hen that started the mutiny. The men, well-driven by Mr. Pike, were
+ripe for an explosion, and Possum and the hen laid the train.
+
+Possum fell away backwards from the coop and loosed a wild cry of pain
+and indignation. This attracted Ditman Olansen’s attention. He paused
+and craned his neck out in order to see, and, in this moment of
+carelessness, the block he was carrying fetched away from him along
+with the several turns of rope around his shoulder. Both the mates
+sprang away to get out from under. The rope, fast to the block and
+following it, lashed about like a blacksnake, and, though the block
+fell clear of Mr. Mellaire, the bight of the rope snatched off his cap.
+
+Mr. Pike had already started an oath aloft when his eyes caught sight
+of the terrible cleft in Mr. Mellaire’s head. There it was, for all the
+world to read, and Mr. Pike’s and mine were the only eyes that could
+read it. The sparse hair upon the second mate’s crown served not at all
+to hide the cleft. It began out of sight in the thicker hair above the
+ears, and was exposed nakedly across the whole dome of head.
+
+The stream of abuse for Ditman Olansen was choked in Mr. Pike’s throat.
+All he was capable of for the moment was to stare, petrified, at that
+enormous fissure flanked at either end with a thatch of grizzled hair.
+He was in a dream, a trance, his great hands knotting and clenching
+unconsciously as he stared at the mark unmistakable by which he had
+said that he would some day identify the murderer of Captain Somers.
+And in that moment I remembered having heard him declare that some day
+he would stick his fingers in that mark.
+
+Still as in a dream, moving slowly, right hand outstretched like a
+talon, with the fingers drawn downward, he advanced on the second mate
+with the evident intention of thrusting his fingers into that cleft and
+of clawing and tearing at the brain-life beneath that pulsed under the
+thin film of skin.
+
+The second mate backed away along the bridge, and Mr. Pike seemed
+partially to come to himself. His outstretched arm dropped to his side,
+and he paused.
+
+“I know you,” he said, in a strange, shaky voice, blended of age and
+passion. “Eighteen years ago you were dismasted off the Plate in the
+_Cyrus Thompson_. She foundered, after you were on your beam ends and
+lost your sticks. You were in the only boat that was saved. Eleven
+years ago, on the _Jason Harrison_, in San Francisco, Captain Somers
+was beaten to death by his second mate. This second mate was a survivor
+of the _Cyrus Thompson_. This second mate’d had his skull split by a
+crazy sea-cook. Your skull is split. This second mate’s name was Sidney
+Waltham. And if you ain’t Sidney Waltham . . . ”
+
+At this point Mr. Mellaire, or, rather, Sidney Waltham, despite his
+fifty years, did what only a sailor could do. He went over the
+bridge-rail side-wise, caught the running gear up-and-down the
+mizzen-mast, and landed lightly on his feet on top of Number Three
+hatch. Nor did he stop there. He ran across the hatch and dived through
+the doorway of his room in the ’midship-house.
+
+Such must have been Mr. Pike’s profundity of passion, that he paused
+like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his
+hand, and seemed to awaken.
+
+But the second mate had not run to his room for refuge. The next moment
+he emerged, a thirty-two Smith and Wesson in his hand, and the instant
+he emerged he began shooting.
+
+Mr. Pike was wholly himself again, and I saw him perceptibly pause and
+decide between the two impulses that tore at him. One was to leap over
+the bridge-rail and down at the man who shot at him; the other was to
+retreat. He retreated. And as he bounded aft along the narrow bridge
+the mutiny began. Arthur Deacon, from the mizzen-top, leaned out and
+hurled a steel marlin-spike at the fleeing mate. The thing flashed in
+the sunlight as it hurtled down. It missed Mr. Pike by twenty feet and
+nearly impaled Possum, who, afraid of firearms, was wildly rushing and
+ki-yi-ing aft. It so happened that the sharp point of the marlin-spike
+struck the wooden floor of the bridge, and it penetrated the planking
+with such force that after it had fetched to a standstill it vibrated
+violently for long seconds.
+
+I confess that I failed to observe a tithe of what occurred during the
+next several minutes. Piece together as I will, after the event, I know
+that I missed much of what took place. I know that the men aloft in the
+mizzen descended to the deck, but I never saw them descend. I know that
+the second mate emptied the chambers of his revolver, but I did not
+hear all the shots. I know that Lars Johnson left the wheel, and on his
+broken leg, rebroken and not yet really mended, limped and scuttled
+across the poop, down the ladder, and gained for’ard. I know he must
+have limped and scuttled on that bad leg of his; I know that I must
+have seen him; and yet I swear that I have no impression of seeing him.
+
+I do know that I heard the rush of feet of men from for’ard along the
+main deck. And I do know that I saw Mr. Pike take shelter behind the
+steel jiggermast. Also, as the second mate manoeuvred to port on top of
+Number Three hatch for his last shot, I know that I saw Mr. Pike duck
+around the corner of the chart-house to starboard and get away aft and
+below by way of the booby-hatch. And I did hear that last futile shot,
+and the bullet also as it ricochetted from the corner of the
+steel-walled chart-house.
+
+As for myself, I did not move. I was too interested in seeing. It may
+have been due to lack of presence of mind, or to lack of habituation to
+an active part in scenes of quick action; but at any rate I merely
+retained my position at the break of the poop and looked on. I was the
+only person on the poop when the mutineers, led by the second mate and
+the gangsters, rushed it. I saw them swarm up the ladder, and it never
+entered my head to attempt to oppose them. Which was just as well, for
+I would have been killed for my pains, and I could never have stopped
+them.
+
+I was alone on the poop, and the men were quite perplexed to find no
+enemy in sight. As Bert Rhine went past, he half fetched up in his
+stride, as if to knife me with the sheath knife, sharp-pointed, which
+he carried in his right hand; then, and I know I correctly measured the
+drift of his judgment, he unflatteringly dismissed me as unimportant
+and ran on.
+
+Right here I was impressed by the lack of clear-thinking on any of
+their parts. So spontaneously had the ship’s company exploded into
+mutiny that it was dazed and confused even while it acted. For
+instance, in the months since we left Baltimore there had never been a
+moment, day or night, even when preventer tackles were rigged, that a
+man had not stood at the wheel. So habituated were they to this, that
+they were shocked into consternation at sight of the deserted wheel.
+They paused for an instant to stare at it. Then Bert Rhine, with a
+quick word and gesture, sent the Italian, Guido Bombini, around the
+rear of the half-wheelhouse. The fact that he completed the circuit was
+proof that nobody was there.
+
+Again, in the swift rush of events, I must confess that I saw but
+little. I was aware that more of the men were climbing up the ladder
+and gaining the poop, but I had no eyes for them. I was watching that
+sanguinary group aft near the wheel and noting the most important
+thing, namely, that it was Bert Rhine, the gangster, and not the second
+mate, who gave orders and was obeyed.
+
+He motioned to the Jew, Isaac Chantz, who had been wounded earlier in
+the voyage by O’Sullivan, and Chantz led the way to the starboard
+chart-house door. While this was going on, all in flashing fractions of
+seconds, Bert Rhine was cautiously inspecting the lazarette through the
+open booby-hatch.
+
+Isaac Chantz jerked open the chart-house door, which swung outward.
+Things did happen so swiftly! As he jerked the iron door open a
+two-foot hacking butcher knife, at the end of a withered, yellow hand,
+flashed out and down on him. It missed head and neck, but caught him on
+top of the left shoulder.
+
+All hands recoiled before this, and the Jew reeled across to the rail,
+his right hand clutching at his wound, and between the fingers I could
+see the blood welling darkly. Bert Rhine abandoned his inspection of
+the booby-hatch, and, with the second mate, the latter still carrying
+his empty Smith & Wesson, sprang into the press about the chart-house
+door.
+
+O wise, clever, cautious, old Chinese steward! He made no emergence.
+The door swung emptily back and forth to the rolling of the _Elsinore_,
+and no man knew but what, just inside, with that heavy, hacking knife
+upraised, lurked the steward. And while they hesitated and stared at
+the aperture that alternately closed and opened with the swinging of
+the door, the booby-hatch, situated between chart-house and wheel,
+erupted. It was Mr. Pike, with his .44 automatic Colt.
+
+There were shots fired, other than by him. I know I heard them, like
+“red-heads” at an old-time Fourth of July; but I do not know who
+discharged them. All was mess and confusion. Many shots were being
+fired, and through the uproar I heard the reiterant, monotonous
+explosions from the Colt’s .44
+
+I saw the Italian, Mike Cipriani, clutch savagely at his abdomen and
+sink slowly to the deck. Shorty, the Japanese half-caste, clown that he
+was, dancing and grinning on the outskirts of the struggle, with a
+final grimace and hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop and
+down the poop-ladder. Never had I seen a finer exemplification of mob
+psychology. Shorty, the most unstable-minded of the individuals who
+composed this mob, by his own instability precipitated the retreat in
+which the mob joined. When he broke before the steady discharge of the
+automatic in the hand of the mate, on the instant the rest broke with
+him. Least-balanced, his balance was the balance of all of them.
+
+Chantz, bleeding prodigiously, was one of the first on Shorty’s heels.
+I saw Nosey Murphy pause long enough to throw his knife at the mate.
+The missile went wide, with a metallic clang struck the brass tip of
+one of the spokes of the _Elsinore’s_ wheel, and clattered on the deck.
+The second mate, with his empty revolver, and Bert Rhine with his
+sheath-knife, fled past me side by side.
+
+Mr. Pike emerged from the booby-hatch and with an unaimed shot brought
+down Bill Quigley, one of the “bricklayers,” who fell at my feet. The
+last man off the poop was the Maltese Cockney, and at the top of the
+ladder he paused to look back at Mr. Pike, who, holding the automatic
+in both hands, was taking careful aim. The Maltese Cockney, disdaining
+the ladder, leaped through the air to the main deck. But the Colt
+merely clicked. It was the last bullet in it that had fetched down Bill
+Quigley.
+
+And the poop was ours.
+
+Events still crowded so closely that I missed much. I saw the steward,
+belligerent and cautious, his long knife poised for a slash, emerge
+from the chart-house. Margaret followed him, and behind her came Wada,
+who carried my .22 Winchester automatic rifle. As he told me
+afterwards, he had brought it up under instructions from her.
+
+Mr. Pike was glancing with cool haste at his Colt to see whether it was
+jammed or empty, when Margaret asked him the course.
+
+“By the wind,” he shouted to her, as he bounded for’ard. “Put your helm
+hard up or we’ll be all aback.”
+
+Ah!—yeoman and henchman of the race, he could not fail in his fidelity
+to the ship under his command. The iron of all his years of iron
+training was there manifest. While mutiny spread red, and death was on
+the wing, he could not forget his charge, the ship, the _Elsinore_, the
+insensate fabric compounded of steel and hemp and woven cotton that was
+to him glorious with personality.
+
+Margaret waved Wada in my direction as she ran to the wheel. As Mr.
+Pike passed the corner of the chart-house, simultaneously there was a
+report from amidships and the ping of a bullet against the steel wall.
+I saw the man who fired the shot. It was the cowboy, Steve Roberts.
+
+As for the mate, he ducked in behind the sheltering jiggermast, and
+even as he ducked his left hand dipped into his side coat-pocket, so
+that when he had gained shelter it was coming out with a fresh clip of
+cartridges. The empty clip fell to the deck, the loaded clip slipped up
+the hollow butt, and he was good for eight more shots.
+
+Wada turned the little automatic rifle over to me, where I still stood
+under the weather cloth at the break of the poop.
+
+“All ready,” he said. “You take off safety.”
+
+“Get Roberts,” Mr. Pike called to me. “He’s the best shot for’ard. If
+you can’t get ’m, jolt the fear of God into him anyway.”
+
+It was the first time I had a human target, and let me say, here and
+now, that I am convinced I am immune to buck fever. There he was before
+me, less than a hundred feet distant, in the gangway between the door
+to Davis’ room and the starboard-rail, manoeuvring for another shot at
+Mr. Pike.
+
+I must have missed Steve Roberts that first time, but I came so near
+him that he jumped. The next instant he had located me and turned his
+revolver on me. But he had no chance. My little automatic was
+discharging as fast as I could tickle the trigger with my fore-finger.
+The cowboy’s first shot went wild of me, because my bullet arrived ere
+he got his swift aim. He swayed and stumbled backward, but the
+bullets—ten of them—poured from the muzzle of my Winchester like water
+from a garden hose. It was a stream of lead I played upon him. I shall
+never know how many times I hit him, but I am confident that after he
+had begun his long staggering fall at least three additional bullets
+entered him ere he impacted on the deck. And even as he was falling,
+aimlessly and mechanically, stricken then with death, he managed twice
+again to discharge his weapon.
+
+And after he struck the deck he never moved. I do believe he died in
+the air.
+
+As I held up my gun and gazed at the abruptly-deserted main-deck I was
+aware of Wada’s touch on my arm. I looked. In his hand were a dozen
+little .22 long, soft-nosed, smokeless cartridges. He wanted me to
+reload. I threw on the safety, opened the magazine, and tilted the
+rifle so that he could let the fresh cartridges of themselves slide
+into place.
+
+“Get some more,” I told him.
+
+Scarcely had he departed on the errand when Bill Quigley, who lay at my
+feet, created a diversion. I jumped—yes, and I freely confess that I
+yelled—with startle and surprise, when I felt his paws clutch my ankles
+and his teeth shut down on the calf of my leg.
+
+It was Mr. Pike to the rescue. I understand now the Western hyperbole
+of “hitting the high places.” The mate did not seem in contact with the
+deck. My impression was that he soared through the air to me, landing
+beside me, and, in the instant of landing, kicking out with one of
+those big feet of his. Bill Quigley was kicked clear away from me, and
+the next moment he was flying overboard. It was a clean throw. He never
+touched the rail.
+
+Whether Mike Cipriani, who, till then, had lain in a welter, began
+crawling aft in quest of safety, or whether he intended harm to
+Margaret at the wheel, we shall never know; for there was no
+opportunity given him to show his purpose. As swiftly as Mr. Pike could
+cross the deck with those giant bounds, just that swiftly was the
+Italian in the air and following Bill Quigley overside.
+
+The mate missed nothing with those eagle eyes of his as he returned
+along the poop. Nobody was to be seen on the main deck. Even the
+lookout had deserted the forecastle-head, and the _Elsinore_, steered
+by Margaret, slipped a lazy two knots through the quiet sea. Mr. Pike
+was apprehensive of a shot from ambush, and it was not until after a
+scrutiny of several minutes that he put his pistol into his side
+coat-pocket and snarled for’ard:
+
+“Come out, you rats! Show your ugly faces! I want to talk with you!”
+
+Guido Bombini, gesticulating peaceable intentions and evidently thrust
+out by Bert Rhine, was the first to appear. When it was observed that
+Mr. Pike did not fire, the rest began to dribble into view. This
+continued till all were there save the cook, the two sail-makers, and
+the second mate. The last to come out were Tom Spink, the boy
+Buckwheat, and Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured but simple-minded
+German; and these three came out only after repeated threats from Bert
+Rhine, who, with Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist, was patently in charge.
+Also, like a faithful dog, Guido Bombini fawned close to him.
+
+“That will do—stop where you are,” Mr. Pike commanded, when the crew
+was scattered abreast, to starboard and to port, of Number Three hatch.
+
+It was a striking scene. _Mutiny on the high seas_! That phrase,
+learned in boyhood from my Marryatt and Cooper, recrudesced in my
+brain. This was it—mutiny on the high seas in the year nineteen
+thirteen—and I was part of it, a perishing blond whose lot was cast
+with the perishing but lordly blonds, and I had already killed a man.
+
+Mr. Pike, in the high place, aged and indomitable; leaned his arm on
+the rail at the break of the poop and gazed down at the mutineers, the
+like of which I’ll wager had never been assembled in mutiny before.
+There were the three gangsters and ex-jailbirds, anything but seamen,
+yet in control of this affair that was peculiarly an affair of the sea.
+With them was the Italian hound, Bombini, and beside them were such
+strangely assorted men as Anton Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, Frank
+Fitzgibbon, and Richard Giller—also Arthur Deacon the white slaver,
+John Hackey the San Francisco hoodlum, the Maltese Cockney, and Tony
+the suicidal Greek.
+
+I noticed the three strange ones, shouldering together and standing
+apart from the others as they swayed to the lazy roll and dreamed with
+their pale, topaz eyes. And there was the Faun, stone deaf but
+observant, straining to understand what was taking place. Yes, and
+Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay were bitterly and eagerly side by side,
+and Ditman Olansen, crank-eyed, as if drawn by some affinity of
+bitterness, stood behind them, his head appearing between their heads.
+Farthest advanced of all was Charles Davis, the man who by all rights
+should long since be dead, his face with its wax-like pallor
+startlingly in contrast to the weathered faces of the rest.
+
+I glanced back at Margaret, who was coolly steering, and she smiled to
+me, and love was in her eyes—she, too, of the perishing and lordly race
+of blonds, her place the high place, her heritage government and
+command and mastery over the stupid lowly of her kind and over the ruck
+and spawn of the dark-pigmented breeds.
+
+“Where’s Sidney Waltham?” the mate snarled. “I want him. Bring him out.
+After that, the rest of you filth get back to work, or God have mercy
+on you.”
+
+The men moved about restlessly, shuffling their feet on the deck.
+
+“Sidney Waltham, I want you—come out!” Mr. Pike called, addressing
+himself beyond them to the murderer of the captain under whom once he
+had sailed.
+
+The prodigious old hero! It never entered his head that he was not the
+master of the rabble there below him. He had but one idea, an idea of
+passion, and that was his desire for vengeance on the murderer of his
+old skipper.
+
+“You old stiff!” Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.
+
+“Shut up, Mulligan!” was Bert Rhine’s command, in receipt of which he
+received a venomous stare from the cripple.
+
+“Oh, ho, my hearty,” Mr. Pike sneered at the gangster. “I’ll take care
+of your case, never fear. In the meantime, and right now, fetch out
+that dog.”
+
+Whereupon he ignored the leader of the mutineers and began calling,
+“Waltham, you dog, come out! Come out, you sneaking cur! Come out!”
+
+_Another lunatic_, was the thought that flashed through my mind;
+another lunatic, the slave of a single idea. He forgets the mutiny, his
+fidelity to the ship, in his personal thirst for vengeance.
+
+But did he? Even as he forgot and called his heart’s desire, which was
+the life of the second mate, even then, without intention,
+mechanically, his sailor’s considerative eye lifted to note the draw of
+the sails and roved from sail to sail. Thereupon, so reminded, he
+returned to his fidelity.
+
+“Well?” he snarled at Bert Rhine. “Go on and get for’ard before I spit
+on you, you scum and slum. I’ll give you and the rest of the rats two
+minutes to return to duty.”
+
+And the leader, with his two fellow-gangsters, laughed their weird,
+silent laughter.
+
+“I guess you’ll listen to our talk, first, old horse,” Bert Rhine
+retorted. “—Davis, get up now and show what kind of a spieler you are.
+Don’t get cold feet. Spit it out to Foxy Grandpa an’ tell ’m what’s
+doin’.”
+
+“You damned sea-lawyer!” Mr. Pike snarled as Davis opened his mouth to
+speak.
+
+Bert Rhine shrugged his shoulders, and half turned on his heel as if to
+depart, as he said quietly:
+
+“Oh, well, if you don’t want to talk . . . ”
+
+Mr. Pike conceded a point.
+
+“Go on!” he snarled. “Spit the dirt out of your system, Davis; but
+remember one thing: you’ll pay for this, and you’ll pay through the
+nose. Go on!”
+
+The sea-lawyer cleared his throat in preparation.
+
+“First of all, I ain’t got no part in this,” he began.
+
+“I’m a sick man, an’ I oughta be in my bunk right now. I ain’t fit to
+be on my feet. But they’ve asked me to advise ’em on the law, an’ I
+have advised ’em—”
+
+“And the law—what is it?” Mr. Pike broke in.
+
+But Davis was uncowed.
+
+“The law is that when the officers is inefficient, the crew can take
+charge peaceably an’ bring the ship into port. It’s all law an’ in the
+records. There was the _Abyssinia_, in eighteen ninety-two, when the
+master’d died of fever and the mates took to drinkin’—”
+
+“Go on!” Mr. Pike shut him off. “I don’t want your citations. What d’ye
+want? Spit it out.”
+
+“Well—and I’m talkin’ as an outsider, as a sick man off duty that’s
+been asked to talk—well, the point is our skipper was a good one, but
+he’s gone. Our mate is violent, seekin’ the life of the second mate. We
+don’t care about that. What we want is to get into port with our lives.
+An’ our lives is in danger. We ain’t hurt nobody. You’ve done all the
+bloodshed. You’ve shot an’ killed an’ thrown two men overboard, as
+witnesses’ll testify to in court. An’ there’s Roberts, there, dead,
+too, an’ headin’ for the sharks—an’ what for? For defendin’ himself
+from murderous an’ deadly attack, as every man can testify an’ tell the
+truth, the whole truth, an’ nothin’ but the truth, so help ’m,
+God—ain’t that right, men?”
+
+A confused murmur of assent arose from many of them.
+
+“You want my job, eh?” Mr. Pike grinned. “An’ what are you goin’ to do
+with me?”
+
+“You’ll be taken care of until we get in an’ turn you over to the
+lawful authorities,” Davis answered promptly. “Most likely you can
+plead insanity an’ get off easy.”
+
+At this moment I felt a stir at my shoulder. It was Margaret, armed
+with the long knife of the steward, whom she had put at the wheel.
+
+“You’ve got another guess comin’, Davis,” Mr. Pike said. “I’ve got no
+more talk with you. I’m goin’ to talk to the bunch. I’ll give you
+fellows just two minutes to choose, and I’ll tell you your choices.
+You’ve only got two choices. You’ll turn the second mate over to me an’
+go back to duty and take what’s comin’ to you, or you’ll go to jail
+with the stripes on you for long sentences. You’ve got two minutes. The
+fellows that want jail can stand right where they are. The fellows that
+don’t want jail and are willin’ to work faithful, can walk right back
+to me here on the poop. Two minutes, an’ you can keep your jaws stopped
+while you think over what it’s goin’ to be.”
+
+He turned his head to me and said in an undertone, “Be ready with that
+pop-gun for trouble. An’ don’t hesitate. Slap it into ’em—the swine
+that think they can put as raw a deal as this over on us.”
+
+It was Buckwheat who made the first move; but so tentative was it that
+it got no farther than a tensing of the legs and a sway forward of the
+shoulders. Nevertheless it was sufficient to start Herman Lunkenheimer,
+who thrust out his foot and began confidently to walk aft. Kid Twist
+gained him in a single spring, and Kid Twist, his wrist under the
+German’s throat from behind; his knee pressed into the German’s back,
+bent the man backward and held him. Even as the rifle came to my
+shoulder, the hound Bombini drew his knife directly beneath Kid Twist’s
+wrist across the up-stretched throat of the man.
+
+It was at this instant that I heard Mr. Pike’s “Plug him!” and pulled
+the trigger; and of all ungodly things the bullet missed and caught the
+Faun, who staggered back, sat down on the hatch, and began to cough.
+And even as he coughed he still strained with pain-eloquent eyes to try
+to understand.
+
+No other man moved. Herman Lunkenheimer, released by Kid Twist, sank
+down on the deck. Nor did I shoot again. Kid Twist stood again by the
+side of Bert Rhine and Guido Bombini fawned near.
+
+Bert Rhine actually visibly smiled.
+
+“Any more of you guys want to promenade aft?” he queried in velvet
+tones.
+
+“Two minutes up,” Mr. Pike declared.
+
+“An’ what are you goin’ to do about it, Grandpa?” Bert Rhine sneered.
+
+In a flash the big automatic was out of the mate’s pocket and he was
+shooting as fast as he could pull trigger, while all hands fled to
+shelter. But, as he had long since told me, he was no shot and could
+effectively use the weapon only at close range—muzzle to stomach
+preferably.
+
+As we stared at the main deck, deserted save for the dead cowboy on his
+back and for the Faun who still sat on the hatch and coughed, an
+eruption of men occurred over the for’ard edge of the ’midship-house.
+
+“Shoot!” Margaret cried at my back.
+
+“Don’t!” Mr. Pike roared at me.
+
+The rifle was at my shoulder when I desisted. Louis, the cook, led the
+rush aft to us across the top of the house and along the bridge. Behind
+him, in single file and not wasting any time, came the Japanese
+sail-makers, Henry the training-ship boy, and the other boy Buckwheat.
+Tom Spink brought up the rear. As he came up the ladder of the
+’midship-house somebody from beneath must have caught him by a leg in
+an effort to drag him back. We saw half of him in sight and knew that
+he was struggling and kicking. He fetched clear abruptly, gained the
+top of the house in a surge, and raced aft along the bridge until he
+overtook and collided with Buckwheat, who yelled out in fear that a
+mutineer had caught him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+
+We who are aft, besieged in the high place, are stronger in numbers
+than I dreamed until now, when I have just finished taking the ship’s
+census. Of course Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself are apart. We alone
+represent the ruling class. With us are servants and serfs, faithful to
+their salt, who look to us for guidance and life.
+
+I use my words advisedly. Tom Spink and Buckwheat are serfs and nothing
+else. Henry, the training-ship boy, occupies an anomalous
+classification. He is of our kind, but he can scarcely be called even a
+cadet of our kind. He will some day win to us and become a mate or a
+captain, but in the meantime, of course, his past is against him. He is
+a candidate, rising from the serf class to our class. Also, he is only
+a youth, the iron of his heredity not yet tested and proven.
+
+Wada, Louis, and the steward are servants of Asiatic breed. So are the
+two Japanese sail-makers—scarcely servants, not to be called slaves,
+but something in between.
+
+So, all told, there are eleven of us aft in the citadel. But our
+followers are too servant-like and serf-like to be offensive fighters.
+They will help us defend the high place against all attack; but they
+are incapable of joining with us in an attack on the other end of the
+ship. They will fight like cornered rats to preserve their lives; but
+they will not advance like tigers upon the enemy. Tom Spink is faithful
+but spirit-broken. Buckwheat is hopelessly of the stupid lowly. Henry
+has not yet won his spurs. On our side remain Margaret, Mr. Pike, and
+myself. The rest will hold the wall of the poop and fight thereon to
+the death, but they are not to be depended upon in a sortie.
+
+At the other end of the ship—and I may as well give the roster, are:
+the second mate, either to be called Mellaire or Waltham, a strong man
+of our own breed but a renegade; the three gangsters, killers and
+jackals, Bert Rhine, Nosey Murphy, and Kid Twist; the Maltese Cockney
+and Tony the crazy Greek; Frank Fitzgibbon and Richard Giller, the
+survivors of the trio of “bricklayers”; Anton Sorensen and Lars
+Jacobsen, stupid Scandinavian sailor-men; Ditman Olansen, the
+crank-eyed Berserk; John Hackey and Arthur Deacon, respectively hoodlum
+and white slaver; Shorty, the mixed-breed clown; Guido Bombini, the
+Italian hound; Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, the bitter ones; the three
+topaz-eyed dreamers, who are unclassifiable; Isaac Chantz, the wounded
+Jew; Bob, the overgrown dolt; the feeble-minded Faun, lung-wounded;
+Nancy and Sundry Buyers, the two hopeless, helpless bosuns; and,
+finally, the sea-lawyer, Charles Davis.
+
+This makes twenty-seven of them against the eleven of us. But there are
+men, strong in viciousness, among them. They, too, have their serfs and
+bravos. Guido Bombini and Isaac Chantz are certainly bravos. And
+weaklings like Sorensen, and Jacobsen, and Bob, cannot be anything else
+than slaves to the men who compose the gangster clique.
+
+I failed to tell what happened yesterday, after Mr. Pike emptied his
+automatic and cleared the deck. The poop was indubitably ours, and
+there was no possibility of the mutineers making a charge on us in
+broad daylight. Margaret had gone below, accompanied by Wada, to see to
+the security of the port and starboard doors that open from the cabin
+directly on the main deck. These are still caulked and tight and
+fastened on the inside, as they have been since the passage of Cape
+Horn began.
+
+Mr. Pike put one of the sail-makers at the wheel, and the steward,
+relieved and starting below, was attracted to the port quarter, where
+the patent log that towed astern was made fast. Margaret had returned
+his knife to him, and he was carrying it in his hand when his attention
+was attracted astern to our wake. Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley had
+managed to catch the lazily moving log-line and were clinging to it.
+The _Elsinore_ was moving just fast enough to keep them on the surface
+instead of dragging them under. Above them and about them circled
+curious and hungry albatrosses, Cape hens, and mollyhawks. Even as I
+glimpsed the situation one of the big birds, a ten-footer at least,
+with a ten-inch beak to the fore, dropped down on the Italian.
+Releasing his hold with one hand, he struck with his knife at the bird.
+Feathers flew, and the albatross, deflected by the blow, fell clumsily
+into the water.
+
+Quite methodically, just as part of the day’s work, the steward chopped
+down with his knife, catching the log-line between the steel edge and
+the rail. At once, no longer buoyed up by the _Elsinore’s_ two-knot
+drag ahead, the wounded men began to swim and flounder. The circling
+hosts of huge sea-birds descended upon them, with carnivorous beaks
+striking at their heads and shoulders and arms. A great screeching and
+squawking arose from the winged things of prey as they strove for the
+living meat. And yet, somehow, I was not very profoundly shocked. These
+were the men whom I had seen eviscerate the shark and toss it
+overboard, and shout with joy as they watched it devoured alive by its
+brethren. They had played a violent, cruel game with the things of
+life, and the things of life now played upon them the same violent,
+cruel game. As they that rise by the sword perish by the sword, just so
+did these two men who had lived cruelly die cruelly.
+
+“Oh, well,” was Mr. Pike’s comment, “we’ve saved two sacks of mighty
+good coal.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Certainly our situation might be worse. We are cooking on the
+coal-stove and on the oil-burners. We have servants to cook and serve
+for us. And, most important of all, we are in possession of all the
+food on the _Elsinore_.
+
+Mr. Pike makes no mistake. Realizing that with our crowd we cannot rush
+the crowd at the other end of the ship, he accepts the siege, which, as
+he says, consists of the besieged holding all food supplies while the
+besiegers are on the imminent edge of famine.
+
+“Starve the dogs,” he growls. “Starve ’m until they crawl aft and lick
+our shoes. Maybe you think the custom of carrying the stores aft just
+happened. Only it didn’t. Before you and I were born it was
+long-established and it was established on brass tacks. They knew what
+they were about, the old cusses, when they put the grub in the
+lazarette.”
+
+Louis says there is not more than three days’ regular whack in the
+galley; that the barrel of hard-tack in the forecastle will quickly go;
+and that our chickens, which they stole last night from the top of the
+’midship-house, are equivalent to no more than an additional day’s
+supply. In short, at the outside limit, we are convinced the men will
+be keen to talk surrender within the week.
+
+We are no longer sailing. In last night’s darkness we helplessly
+listened to the men loosing headsail-halyards and letting yards go down
+on the run. Under orders of Mr. Pike I shot blindly and many times into
+the dark, but without result, save that we heard the bullets of
+answering shots strike against the chart-house. So to-day we have not
+even a man at the wheel. The _Elsinore_ drifts idly on an idle sea, and
+we stand regular watches in the shelter of chart-house and jiggermast.
+Mr. Pike says it is the laziest time he has had on the whole voyage.
+
+I alternate watches with him, although when on duty there is little to
+be done, save, in the daytime, to stand rifle in hand behind the
+jiggermast, and, in the night, to lurk along the break of the poop.
+Behind the chart-house, ready to repel assault, are my watch of four
+men: Tom Spink, Wada, Buckwheat, and Louis. Henry, the two Japanese
+sail-makers, and the old steward compose Mr. Pike’s watch.
+
+It is his orders that no one for’ard is to be allowed to show himself,
+so, to-day, when the second mate appeared at the corner of the
+’midship-house, I made him take a quick leap back with the thud of my
+bullet against the iron wall a foot from his head. Charles Davis tried
+the same game and was similarly stimulated.
+
+Also, this evening, after dark, Mr. Pike put block-and-tackle on the
+first section of the bridge, heaved it out of place, and lowered it
+upon the poop. Likewise he hoisted in the ladder at the break of the
+poop that leads down to the main deck. The men will have to do some
+climbing if they ever elect to rush us.
+
+I am writing this in my watch below. I came off duty at eight o’clock,
+and at midnight I go on deck to stay till four to-morrow morning. Wada
+shakes his head and says that the Blackwood Company should rebate us on
+the first-class passage paid in advance. We are working our passage, he
+contends.
+
+Margaret takes the adventure joyously. It is the first time she has
+experienced mutiny, but she is such a thorough sea-woman that she
+appears like an old hand at the game. She leaves the deck to the mate
+and me; but, still acknowledging his leadership, she has taken charge
+below and entirely manages the commissary, the cooking, and the
+sleeping arrangements. We still keep our old quarters, and she has
+bedded the new-comers in the big after-room with blankets issued from
+the slop-chest.
+
+In a way, from the standpoint of her personal welfare, the mutiny is
+the best thing that could have happened to her. It has taken her mind
+off her father and filled her waking hours with work to do. This
+afternoon, standing above the open booby-hatch, I heard her laugh ring
+out as in the old days coming down the Atlantic. Yes, and she hums
+snatches of songs under her breath as she works. In the second
+dog-watch this evening, after Mr. Pike had finished dinner and joined
+us on the poop, she told him that if he did not soon re-rig his
+phonograph she was going to start in on the piano. The reason she
+advanced was the psychological effect such sounds of revelry would have
+on the starving mutineers.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The days pass, and nothing of moment happens. We get nowhere. The
+_Elsinore_, without the steadying of her canvas, rolls emptily and
+drifts a lunatic course. Sometimes she is bow on to the wind, and at
+other times she is directly before it; but at all times she is circling
+vaguely and hesitantly to get somewhere else than where she is. As an
+illustration, at daylight this morning she came up into the wind as if
+endeavouring to go about. In the course of half an hour she worked off
+till the wind was directly abeam. In another half hour she was back
+into the wind. Not until evening did she manage to get the wind on her
+port bow; but when she did, she immediately paid off, accomplished the
+complete circle in an hour, and recommenced her morning tactics of
+trying to get into the wind.
+
+And there is nothing for us to do save hold the poop against the attack
+that is never made. Mr. Pike, more from force of habit than anything
+else, takes his regular observations and works up the _Elsinore’s_
+position. This noon she was eight miles east of yesterday’s position,
+yet to-day’s position, in longitude, was within a mile of where she was
+four days ago. On the other hand she invariably makes northing at the
+rate of seven or eight miles a day.
+
+Aloft, the _Elsinore_ is a sad spectacle. All is confusion and
+disorder. The sails, unfurled, are a slovenly mess along the yards, and
+many loose ends sway dismally to every roll. The only yard that is
+loose is the main-yard. It is fortunate that wind and wave are mild,
+else would the iron-work carry away and the mutineers find the huge
+thing of steel about their ears.
+
+There is one thing we cannot understand. A week has passed, and the men
+show no signs of being starved into submission. Repeatedly and in vain
+has Mr. Pike interrogated the hands aft with us. One and all, from the
+cook to Buckwheat, they swear they have no knowledge of any food
+for’ard, save the small supply in the galley and the barrel of hardtack
+in the forecastle. Yet it is very evident that those for’ard are not
+starving. We see the smoke from the galley-stove and can only conclude
+that they have food to cook.
+
+Twice has Bert Rhine attempted a truce, but both times his white flag,
+as soon as it showed above the edge of the ’midship-house, was fired
+upon by Mr. Pike. The last occurrence was two days ago. It is Mr.
+Pike’s intention thoroughly to starve them into submission, but now he
+is beginning to worry about their mysterious food supply.
+
+Mr. Pike is not quite himself. He is obsessed, I know beyond any doubt,
+with the idea of vengeance on the second mate. On divers occasions,
+now, I have come unexpectedly upon him and found him muttering to
+himself with grim set face, or clenching and unclenching his big square
+fists and grinding his teeth. His conversation continually runs upon
+the feasibility of our making a night attack for’ard, and he is
+perpetually questioning Tom Spink and Louis on their ideas of where the
+various men may be sleeping—the point of which always is: _Where is the
+second mate likely to be sleeping_?
+
+No later than yesterday afternoon did he give me most positive proof of
+his obsession. It was four o’clock, the beginning of the first
+dog-watch, and he had just relieved me. So careless have we grown, that
+we now stand in broad daylight at the exposed break of the poop. Nobody
+shoots at us, and, occasionally, over the top of the for’ard-house,
+Shorty sticks up his head and grins or makes clownish faces at us. At
+such times Mr. Pike studies Shorty’s features through the telescope in
+an effort to find signs of starvation. Yet he admits dolefully that
+Shorty is looking fleshed-up.
+
+But to return. Mr. Pike had just relieved me yesterday afternoon, when
+the second mate climbed the forecastle-head and sauntered to the very
+eyes of the _Elsinore_, where he stood gazing overside.
+
+“Take a crack at ’m,” Mr. Pike said.
+
+It was a long shot, and I was taking slow and careful aim, when he
+touched my arm.
+
+“No; don’t,” he said.
+
+I lowered the little rifle and looked at him inquiringly.
+
+“You might hit him,” he explained. “And I want him for myself.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Life is never what we expect it to be. All our voyage from Baltimore
+south to the Horn and around the Horn has been marked by violence and
+death. And now that it has culminated in open mutiny there is no more
+violence, much less death. We keep to ourselves aft, and the mutineers
+keep to themselves for’ard. There is no more harshness, no more
+snarling and bellowing of commands; and in this fine weather a general
+festival obtains.
+
+Aft, Mr. Pike and Margaret alternate with phonograph and piano; and
+for’ard, although we cannot see them, a full-fledged “foo-foo” band
+makes most of the day and night hideous. A squealing accordion that Tom
+Spink says was the property of Mike Cipriani is played by Guido
+Bombini, who sets the pace and seems the leader of the foo-foo. There
+are two broken-reeded harmonicas. Someone plays a jew’s-harp. Then
+there are home-made fifes and whistles and drums, combs covered with
+paper, extemporized triangles, and bones made from ribs of salt horse
+such as negro minstrels use.
+
+The whole crew seems to compose the band, and, like a lot of
+monkey-folk rejoicing in rude rhythm, emphasizes the beat by hammering
+kerosene cans, frying-pans, and all sorts of things metallic or
+reverberant. Some genius has rigged a line to the clapper of the ship’s
+bell on the forecastle-head and clangs it horribly in the big foo-foo
+crises, though Bombini can be heard censuring him severely on occasion.
+And to cap it all, the fog-horn machine pumps in at the oddest moments
+in imitation of a big bass viol.
+
+And this is mutiny on the high seas! Almost every hour of my
+deck-watches I listen to this infernal din, and am maddened into desire
+to join with Mr. Pike in a night attack and put these rebellious and
+inharmonious slaves to work.
+
+Yet they are not entirely inharmonious. Guido Bombini has a respectable
+though untrained tenor voice, and has surprised me by a variety of
+selections, not only from Verdi, but from Wagner and Massenet. Bert
+Rhine and his crowd are full of rag-time junk, and one phrase that has
+caught the fancy of all hands, and which they roar out at all times,
+is: “_It’s a bear_! _It’s a bear_! _It’s a bear_!” This morning Nancy,
+evidently very strongly urged, gave a doleful rendering of _Flying
+Cloud_. Yes, and in the second dog-watch last evening our three
+topaz-eyed dreamers sang some folk-song strangely sweet and sad.
+
+And this is mutiny! As I write I can scarcely believe it. Yet I know
+Mr. Pike keeps the watch over my head. I hear the shrill laughter of
+the steward and Louis over some ancient Chinese joke. Wada and the
+sail-makers, in the pantry, are, I know, talking Japanese politics. And
+from across the cabin, along the narrow halls, I can hear Margaret
+softly humming as she goes to bed.
+
+But all doubts vanish at the stroke of eight bells, when I go on deck
+to relieve Mr. Pike, who lingers a moment for a “gam,” as he calls it.
+
+“Say,” he said confidentially, “you and I can clean out the whole gang.
+All we got to do is sneak for’ard and turn loose. As soon as we begin
+to shoot up, half of ’em’ll bolt aft—lobsters like Nancy, an’ Sundry
+Buyers, an’ Jacobsen, an’ Bob, an’ Shorty, an’ them three castaways,
+for instance. An’ while they’re doin’ that, an’ our bunch on the poop
+is takin’ ’em in, you an’ me can make a pretty big hole in them that’s
+left. What d’ye say?”
+
+I hesitated, thinking of Margaret.
+
+“Why, say,” he urged, “once I jumped into that fo’c’s’le, at close
+range, I’d start right in, blim-blam-blim, fast as you could wink,
+nailing them gangsters, an’ Bombini, an’ the Sheeny, an’ Deacon, an’
+the Cockney, an’ Mulligan Jacobs, an’ . . . an’ . . . Waltham.”
+
+“That would be nine,” I smiled. “You’ve only eight shots in your Colt.”
+
+Mr. Pike considered a moment, and revised his list. “All right,” he
+agreed, “I guess I’ll have to let Jacobs go. What d’ye say? Are you
+game?”
+
+Still I hesitated, but before I could speak he anticipated me and
+returned to his fidelity.
+
+“No, you can’t do it, Mr. Pathurst. If by any luck they got the both of
+us . . . No; we’ll just stay aft and sit tight until they’re starved to
+it . . . But where they get their tucker gets me. For’ard she’s as bare
+as a bone, as any decent ship ought to be, and yet look at ’em, rolling
+hog fat. And by rights they ought to a-quit eatin’ a week ago.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+
+Yes, it is certainly mutiny. Collecting water from the leaders of the
+chart-house in a shower of rain this morning, Buckwheat exposed
+himself, and a long, lucky revolver-shot from for’ard caught him in the
+shoulder. The bullet was small-calibre and spent ere it reached him, so
+that he received no more than a flesh-wound, though he carried on as if
+he were dying until Mr. Pike hushed his noise by cuffing his ears.
+
+I should not like to have Mr. Pike for my surgeon. He probed for the
+bullet with his little finger, which was far too big for the aperture;
+and with his little finger, while with his other hand he threatened
+another ear-clout, he gouged out the leaden pellet. Then he sent the
+boy below, where Margaret took him in charge with antiseptics and
+dressings.
+
+I see her so rarely that a half-hour alone with her these days is an
+adventure. She is busy morning to night in keeping her house in order.
+As I write this, through my open door I can hear her laying the law
+down to the men in the after-room. She has issued underclothes all
+around from the slop-chest, and is ordering them to take a bath in the
+rain-water just caught. And to make sure of their thoroughness in the
+matter, she has told off Louis and the steward to supervise the
+operation. Also, she has forbidden them smoking their pipes in the
+after-room. And, to cap everything, they are to scrub walls, ceiling,
+everything, and then start to-morrow morning at painting. All of which
+serves to convince me almost that mutiny does not obtain and that I
+have imagined it.
+
+But no. I hear Buckwheat blubbering and demanding how he can take a
+bath in his wounded condition. I wait and listen for Margaret’s
+judgment. Nor am I disappointed. Tom Spink and Henry are told off to
+the task, and the thorough scrubbing of Buckwheat is assured.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The mutineers are not starving. To-day they have been fishing for
+albatrosses. A few minutes after they caught the first one its carcase
+was flung overboard. Mr. Pike studied it through his sea-glasses, and I
+heard him grit his teeth when he made certain that it was not the mere
+feathers and skin but the entire carcass. They had taken only its
+wing-bones to make into pipe-stems. The inference was obvious:
+_starving men would not throw meat away in such fashion_.
+
+But where do they get their food? It is a sea-mystery in itself,
+although I might not so deem it were it not for Mr. Pike.
+
+“I think, and think, till my brain is all frazzled out,” he tells me;
+“and yet I can’t get a line on it. I know every inch of space on the
+_Elsinore_, and know there isn’t an ounce of grub anywhere for’ard, and
+yet they eat! I’ve overhauled the lazarette. As near as I can make it
+out, nothing is missing. Then where do they get it? That’s what I want
+to know. Where do they get it?”
+
+I know that this morning he spent hours in the lazarette with the
+steward and the cook, overhauling and checking off from the lists of
+the Baltimore agents. And I know that they came up out of the
+lazarette, the three of them, dripping with perspiration and baffled.
+The steward has raised the hypothesis that, first of all, there were
+extra stores left over from the previous voyage, or from previous
+voyages, and, next, that the stealing of these stores must have taken
+place during the night-watches when it was Mr. Pike’s turn below.
+
+At any rate, the mate takes the food mystery almost as much to heart as
+he takes the persistent and propinquitous existence of Sidney Waltham.
+
+I am coming to realize the meaning of watch-and-watch. To begin with, I
+spend on deck twelve hours, and a fraction more, of each twenty-four. A
+fair portion of the remaining twelve is spent in eating, in dressing,
+and in undressing, and with Margaret. As a result, I feel the need for
+more sleep than I am getting. I scarcely read at all, now. The moment
+my head touches the pillow I am asleep. Oh, I sleep like a baby, eat
+like a navvy, and in years have not enjoyed such physical well-being. I
+tried to read George Moore last night, and was dreadfully bored. He may
+be a realist, but I solemnly aver he does not know reality on that
+tight, little, sheltered-life archipelago of his. If he could wind-jam
+around the Horn just one voyage he would be twice the writer.
+
+And Mr. Pike, for practically all of his sixty-nine years, has stood
+his watch-and-watch, with many a spill-over of watches into watches.
+And yet he is iron. In a struggle with him I am confident that he would
+break me like so much straw. He is truly a prodigy of a man, and, so
+far as to-day is concerned, an anachronism.
+
+The Faun is not dead, despite my unlucky bullet. Henry insisted that he
+caught a glimpse of him yesterday. To-day I saw him myself. He came to
+the corner of the ’midship-house and gazed wistfully aft at the poop,
+straining and eager to understand. In the same way I have often seen
+Possum gaze at me.
+
+It has just struck me that of our eight followers five are Asiatic and
+only three are our own breed. Somehow it reminds me of India and of
+Clive and Hastings.
+
+And the fine weather continues, and we wonder how long a time must
+elapse ere our mutineers eat up their mysterious food and are starved
+back to work.
+
+We are almost due west of Valparaiso and quite a bit less than a
+thousand miles off the west coast of South America. The light northerly
+breezes, varying from north-east to west, would, according to Mr. Pike,
+work us in nicely for Valparaiso if only we had sail on the _Elsinore_.
+As it is, sailless, she drifts around and about and makes nowhere save
+for the slight northerly drift each day.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Mr. Pike is beside himself. In the past two days he has displayed
+increasing possession of himself by the one idea of vengeance on the
+second mate. It is not the mutiny, irksome as it is and helpless as it
+makes him; it is the presence of the murderer of his old-time and
+admired skipper, Captain Somers.
+
+The mate grins at the mutiny, calls it a snap, speaks gleefully of how
+his wages are running up, and regrets that he is not ashore, where he
+would be able to take a hand in gambling on the reinsurance. But the
+sight of Sidney Waltham, calmly gazing at sea and sky from the
+forecastle-head, or astride the far end of the bowsprit and fishing for
+sharks, maddens him. Yesterday, coming to relieve me, he borrowed my
+rifle and turned loose the stream of tiny pellets on the second mate,
+who coolly made his line secure ere he scrambled in-board. Of course,
+it was only one chance in a hundred that Mr. Pike might have hit him,
+but Sidney Waltham did not care to encourage the chance.
+
+And yet it is not like mutiny—not like the conventional mutiny I
+absorbed as a boy, and which has become classic in the literature of
+the sea. There is no hand-to-hand fighting, no crash of cannon and
+flash of cutlass, no sailors drinking grog, no lighted matches held
+over open powder-magazines. Heavens!—there isn’t a single cutlass nor a
+powder-magazine on board. And as for grog, not a man has had a drink
+since Baltimore.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Well, it is mutiny after all. I shall never doubt it again. It may be
+nineteen-thirteen mutiny on a coal-carrier, with feeblings and
+imbeciles and criminals for mutineers; but at any rate mutiny it is,
+and at least in the number of deaths it is reminiscent of the old days.
+For things have happened since last I had opportunity to write up this
+log. For that matter, I am now the keeper of the _Elsinore’s_ official
+log as well, in which work Margaret helps me.
+
+And I might have known it would happen. At four yesterday morning I
+relieved Mr. Pike. When in the darkness I came up to him at the break
+of the poop, I had to speak to him twice to make him aware of my
+presence. And then he merely grunted acknowledgment in an absent sort
+of way.
+
+The next moment he brightened up, and was himself save that he was too
+bright. He was making an effort. I felt this, but was quite unprepared
+for what followed.
+
+“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, as he put his leg over the rail
+and lightly and swiftly lowered himself down into the darkness.
+
+There was nothing I could do. To cry out or to attempt to reason with
+him would only have drawn the mutineers’ attention. I heard his feet
+strike the deck beneath as he let go. Immediately he started for’ard.
+Little enough precaution he took. I swear that clear to the
+’midship-house I heard the dragging age-lag of his feet. Then that
+ceased, and that was all.
+
+I repeat. That was all. Never a sound came from for’ard. I held my
+watch till daylight. I held it till Margaret came on deck with her
+cheery “What ho of the night, brave mariner?” I held the next watch
+(which should have been the mate’s) till midday, eating both breakfast
+and lunch behind the sheltering jiggermast. And I held all afternoon,
+and through both dog-watches, my dinner served likewise on the deck.
+
+And that was all. Nothing happened. The galley-stove smoked three
+times, advertising the cooking of three meals. Shorty made faces at me
+as usual across the rim of the for’ard-house. The Maltese Cockney
+caught an albatross. There was some excitement when Tony the Greek
+hooked a shark off the jib-boom, so big that half a dozen tailed on to
+the line and failed to land it. But I caught no glimpse of Mr. Pike nor
+of the renegade Sidney Waltham.
+
+In short, it was a lazy, quiet day of sunshine and gentle breeze. There
+was no inkling to what had happened to the mate. Was he a prisoner? Was
+he already overside? Why were there no shots? He had his big automatic.
+It is inconceivable that he did not use it at least once. Margaret and
+I discussed the affair till we were well a-weary, but reached no
+conclusion.
+
+She is a true daughter of the race. At the end of the second dog-watch,
+armed with her father’s revolver, she insisted on standing the first
+watch of the night. I compromised with the inevitable by having Wada
+make up my bed on the deck in the shelter of the cabin skylight just
+for’ard of the jiggermast. Henry, the two sail-makers and the steward,
+variously equipped with knives and clubs, were stationed along the
+break of the poop.
+
+And right here I wish to pass my first criticism on modern mutiny. On
+ships like the _Elsinore_ there are not enough weapons to go around.
+The only firearms now aft are Captain West’s .38 Colt revolver, and my
+.22 automatic Winchester. The old steward, with a penchant for hacking
+and chopping, has his long knife and a butcher’s cleaver. Henry, in
+addition to his sheath-knife, has a short bar of iron. Louis, despite a
+most sanguinary array of butcher-knives and a big poker, pins his
+cook’s faith on hot water and sees to it that two kettles are always
+piping on top the cabin stove. Buckwheat, who on account of his wound
+is getting all night in for a couple of nights, cherishes a hatchet.
+
+The rest of our retainers have knives and clubs, although Yatsuda, the
+first sail-maker, carries a hand-axe, and Uchino, the second
+sail-maker, sleeping or waking, never parts from a claw-hammer. Tom
+Spink has a harpoon. Wada, however, is the genius. By means of the
+cabin stove he has made a sharp pike-point of iron and fitted it to a
+pole. To-morrow be intends to make more for the other men.
+
+It is rather shuddery, however, to speculate on the terrible assortment
+of cutting, gouging, jabbing and slashing weapons with which the
+mutineers are able to equip themselves from the carpenter’s shop. If it
+ever comes to an assault on the poop there will be a weird mess of
+wounds for the survivors to dress. For that matter, master as I am of
+my little rifle, no man could gain the poop in the day-time. Of course,
+if rush they will, they will rush us in the night, when my rifle will
+be worthless. Then it will be blow for blow, hand-to-hand, and the
+strongest pates and arms will win.
+
+But no. I have just bethought me. We shall be ready for any night-rush.
+I’ll take a leaf out of modern warfare, and show them not only that we
+are top-dog (a favourite phrase of the mate), but _why_ we are top-dog.
+It is simple—night illumination. As I write I work out the
+idea—gasoline, balls of oakum, caps and gunpowder from a few
+cartridges, Roman candles, and flares blue, red, and green, shallow
+metal receptacles to carry the explosive and inflammable stuff; and a
+trigger-like arrangement by which, pulling on a string, the caps are
+exploded in the gunpowder and fire set to the gasoline-soaked oakum and
+to the flares and candles. It will be brain as well as brawn against
+mere brawn.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+I have worked like a Trojan all day, and the idea is realized. Margaret
+helped me out with suggestions, and Tom Spink did the sailorizing. Over
+our head, from the jiggermast, the steel stays that carry the three
+jigger-trysails descend high above the break of the poop and across the
+main deck to the mizzenmast. A light line has been thrown over each
+stay, and been thrown repeatedly around so as to form an unslipping
+knot. Tom Spink waited till dark, when he went aloft and attached loose
+rings of stiff wire around the stays below the knots. Also he bent on
+hoisting-gear and connected permanent fastenings with the sliding
+rings. And further, between rings and fastenings, is a slack of fifty
+feet of light line.
+
+This is the idea: after dark each night we shall hoist our three metal
+wash-basins, loaded with inflammables, up to the stays. The arrangement
+is such that at the first alarm of a rush, by pulling a cord the
+trigger is pulled that ignites the powder, and the very same pull
+operates a trip-device that lets the rings slide down the steel stays.
+Of course, suspended from the rings, are the illuminators, and when
+they have run down the stays fifty feet the lines will automatically
+bring them to rest. Then all the main deck between the poop and the
+mizzen-mast will be flooded with light, while we shall be in
+comparative darkness.
+
+Of course each morning before daylight we shall lower all this
+apparatus to the deck, so that the men for’ard will not guess what we
+have up our sleeve, or, rather, what we have up on the trysail-stays.
+Even to-day the little of our gear that has to be left standing aroused
+their curiosity. Head after head showed over the edge of the
+for’ard-house as they peeped and peered and tried to make out what we
+were up to. Why, I find myself almost looking forward to an attack in
+order to see the device work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+
+And what has happened to Mr. Pike remains a mystery. For that matter,
+what has happened to the second mate? In the past three days we have by
+our eyes taken the census of the mutineers. Every man has been seen by
+us with the sole exception of Mr. Mellaire, or Sidney Waltham, as I
+assume I must correctly name him. He has not appeared—does not appear;
+and we can only speculate and conjecture.
+
+In the past three days various interesting things have taken place.
+Margaret stands watch and watch with me, day and night, the clock
+around; for there is no one of our retainers to whom we can entrust the
+responsibility of a watch. Though mutiny obtains and we are besieged in
+the high place, the weather is so mild and there is so little call on
+our men that they have grown careless and sleep aft of the chart-house
+when it is their watch on deck. Nothing ever happens, and, like true
+sailors, they wax fat and lazy. Even have I found Louis, the steward,
+and Wada guilty of cat-napping. In fact, the training-ship boy, Henry,
+is the only one who has never lapsed.
+
+Oh, yes, and I gave Tom Spink a thrashing yesterday. Since the
+disappearance of the mate he had had little faith in me, and had been
+showing vague signs of insolence and insubordination. Both Margaret and
+I had noted it independently. Day before yesterday we talked it over.
+
+“He is a good sailor, but weak,” she said. “If we let him go on, he
+will infect the rest.”
+
+“Very well, I’ll take him in hand,” I announced valorously.
+
+“You will have to,” she encouraged. “Be hard. Be hard. You must be
+hard.”
+
+Those who sit in the high places must be hard, yet have I discovered
+that it is hard to be hard. For instance, easy enough was it to drop
+Steve Roberts as he was in the act of shooting at me. Yet it is most
+difficult to be hard with a chuckle-headed retainer like Tom
+Spink—especially when he continually fails by a shade to give
+sufficient provocation. For twenty-four hours after my talk with
+Margaret I was on pins and needles to have it out with him, yet rather
+than have had it out with him I should have preferred to see the poop
+rushed by the gang from the other side.
+
+Not in a day can the tyro learn to employ the snarling immediacy of
+mastery of Mr. Pike, nor the reposeful, voiceless mastery of a Captain
+West. Truly, the situation was embarrassing. I was not trained in the
+handling of men, and Tom Spink knew it in his chuckle-headed way. Also,
+in his chuckle-headed way, he was dispirited by the loss of the mate.
+Fearing the mate, nevertheless he had depended on the mate to fetch him
+through with a whole skin, or at least alive. On me he has no
+dependence. What chance had the gentleman passenger and the captain’s
+daughter against the gang for’ard? So he must have reasoned, and, so
+reasoning, become despairing and desperate.
+
+After Margaret had told me to be hard I watched Tom Spink with an eagle
+eye, and he must have sensed my attitude, for he carefully forebore
+from overstepping, while all the time he palpitated just on the edge of
+overstepping. Yes, and it was clear that Buckwheat was watching to
+learn the outcome of this veiled refractoriness. For that matter, the
+situation was not being missed by our keen-eyed Asiatics, and I know
+that I caught Louis several times verging on the offence of offering me
+advice. But he knew his place and managed to keep his tongue between
+his teeth.
+
+At last, yesterday, while I held the watch, Tom Spink was guilty of
+spitting tobacco juice on the deck.
+
+Now it must be understood that such an act is as grave an offence of
+the sea as blasphemy is of the Church.
+
+It was Margaret who came to where I was stationed by the jiggermast and
+told me what had occurred; and it was she who took my rifle and
+relieved me so that I could go aft.
+
+There was the offensive spot, and there was Tom Spink, his cheek
+bulging with a quid.
+
+“Here, you, get a swab and mop that up,” I commanded in my harshest
+manner.
+
+Tom Spink merely rolled his quid with his tongue and regarded me with
+sneering thoughtfulness. I am sure he was no more surprised than was I
+by the immediateness of what followed. My fist went out like an arrow
+from a released bow, and Tom Spink staggered back, tripped against the
+corner of the tarpaulin-covered sounding-machine, and sprawled on the
+deck. He tried to make a fight of it, but I followed him up, giving him
+no chance to set himself or recover from the surprise of my first
+onslaught.
+
+Now it so happens that not since I was a boy have I struck a person
+with my naked fist, and I candidly admit that I enjoyed the trouncing I
+administered to poor Tom Spink. Yes, and in the rapid play about the
+deck I caught a glimpse of Margaret. She had stepped out of the shelter
+of the mast and was looking on from the corner of the chart-house. Yes,
+and more; she was looking on with a cool, measuring eye.
+
+Oh, it was all very grotesque, to be sure. But then, mutiny on the high
+seas in the year nineteen-thirteen is also grotesque. No lists here
+between mailed knights for a lady’s favour, but merely the trouncing of
+a chuckle-head for spitting on the deck of a coal-carrier.
+Nevertheless, the fact that my lady looked on added zest to my
+enterprise, and, doubtlessly, speed and weight to my blows, and at
+least half a dozen additional clouts to the unlucky sailor.
+
+Yes, man is strangely and wonderfully made. Now that I coolly consider
+the matter, I realize that it was essentially the same spirit with
+which I enjoyed beating up Tom Spink, that I have in the past enjoyed
+contests of the mind in which I have out-epigrammed clever opponents.
+In the one case, one proves himself top-dog of the mind; in the other,
+top-dog of the muscle. Whistler and Wilde were just as much
+intellectual bullies as I was a physical bully yesterday morning when I
+punched Tom Spink into lying down and staying down.
+
+And my knuckles are sore and swollen. I cease writing for a moment to
+look at them and to hope that they will not stay permanently enlarged.
+
+At any rate, Tom Spink took his disciplining and promised to come in
+and be good.
+
+“Sir!” I thundered at him, quite in Mr. Pike’s most bloodthirsty
+manner.
+
+“Sir,” he mumbled with bleeding lips. “Yes, sir, I’ll mop it up, sir.
+Yes, sir.”
+
+I could scarcely keep from laughing in his face, the whole thing was so
+ludicrous; but I managed to look my haughtiest, and sternest, and
+fiercest, while I superintended the deck-cleansing. The funniest thing
+about the affair was that I must have knocked Tom Spink’s quid down his
+throat, for he was gagging and hiccoughing all the time he mopped and
+scrubbed.
+
+The atmosphere aft has been wonderfully clear ever since. Tom Spink
+obeys all orders on the jump, and Buckwheat jumps with equal celerity.
+As for the five Asiatics, I feel that they are stouter behind me now
+that I have shown masterfulness. By punching a man’s face I verily
+believe I have doubled our united strength. And there is no need to
+punch any of the rest. The Asiatics are keen and willing. Henry is a
+true cadet of the breed, Buckwheat will follow Tom Spink’s lead, and
+Tom Spink, a proper Anglo-Saxon peasant, will lead Buckwheat all the
+better by virtue of the punching.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Two days have passed, and two noteworthy things have happened. The men
+seem to be nearing the end of their mysterious food supply, and we have
+had our first truce.
+
+I have noted, through the glasses, that no more carcasses of the
+mollyhawks they are now catching are thrown overboard. This means that
+they have begun to eat the tough and unsavoury creatures, although it
+does not mean, of course, that they have entirely exhausted their other
+stores.
+
+It was Margaret, her sailor’s eye on the falling barometer and on the
+“making” stuff adrift in the sky, who called my attention to a coming
+blow.
+
+“As soon as the sea rises,” she said, “we’ll have that loose main-yard
+and all the rest of the top-hamper tumbling down on deck.”
+
+So it was that I raised the white flag for a parley. Bert Rhine and
+Charles Davis came abaft the ’midship-house, and, while we talked, many
+faces peered over the for’ard edge of the house and many forms slouched
+into view on the deck on each side of the house.
+
+“Well, getting tired?” was Bert Rhine’s insolent greeting. “Anything we
+can do for you?”
+
+“Yes, there is,” I answered sharply. “You can save your heads so that
+when you return to work there will be enough of you left to do the
+work.”
+
+“If you are making threats—” Charles Davis began, but was silenced by a
+glare from the gangster.
+
+“Well, what is it?” Bert Rhine demanded. “Cough it off your chest.”
+
+“It’s for your own good,” was my reply. “It is coming on to blow, and
+all that unfurled canvas aloft will bring the yards down on your heads.
+We’re safe here, aft. You are the ones who will run risks, and it is up
+to you to hustle your crowd aloft and make things fast and ship-shape.”
+
+“And if we don’t?” the gangster sneered.
+
+“Why, you’ll take your chances, that is all,” I answered carelessly. “I
+just want to call your attention to the fact that one of those steel
+yards, end-on, will go through the roof of your forecastle as if it
+were so much eggshell.”
+
+Bert Rhine looked to Charles Davis for verification, and the latter
+nodded.
+
+“We’ll talk it over first,” the gangster announced.
+
+“And I’ll give you ten minutes,” I returned. “If at the end of ten
+minutes you’ve not started taking in, it will be too late. I shall put
+a bullet into any man who shows himself.”
+
+“All right, we’ll talk it over.”
+
+As they started to go back, I called:
+
+“One moment.”
+
+They stopped and turned about.
+
+“What have you done to Mr. Pike?” I asked.
+
+Even the impassive Bert Rhine could not quite conceal his surprise.
+
+“An’ what have you done with Mr. Mellaire!” he retorted. “You tell us,
+an’ we’ll tell you.”
+
+I am confident of the genuineness of his surprise. Evidently the
+mutineers have been believing us guilty of the disappearance of the
+second mate, just as we have been believing them guilty of the
+disappearance of the first mate. The more I dwell upon it the more it
+seems the proposition of the Kilkenny cats, a case of mutual
+destruction on the part of the two mates.
+
+“Another thing,” I said quickly. “Where do you get your food?”
+
+Bert Rhine laughed one of his silent laughs; Charles Davis assumed an
+expression of mysteriousness and superiority; and Shorty, leaping into
+view from the corner of the house, danced a jig of triumph.
+
+I drew out my watch.
+
+“Remember,” I said, “you’ve ten minutes in which to make a start.”
+
+They turned and went for’ard, and, before the ten minutes were up, all
+hands were aloft and stowing canvas. All this time the wind, out of the
+north-west, was breezing up. The old familiar harp-chords of a rising
+gale were strumming along the rigging, and the men, I verily believe
+from lack of practice, were particularly slow at their work.
+
+“It would be better if the upper-and-lower top-sails are set so that we
+can heave to,” Margaret suggested. “They will steady her and make it
+more comfortable for us.”
+
+I seized the idea and improved upon it.
+
+“Better set the upper and lower topsails so that we can handle the
+ship,” I called to the gangster, who was ordering the men about, quite
+like a mate, from the top of the ’midship-house.
+
+He considered the idea, and then gave the proper orders, although it
+was the Maltese Cockney, with Nancy and Sundry Buyers under him, who
+carried the orders out.
+
+I ordered Tom Spink to the long-idle wheel, and gave him the course,
+which was due east by the steering compass. This put the wind on our
+port quarter, so that the _Elsinore_ began to move through the water
+before a fair breeze. And due east, less than a thousand miles away,
+lay the coast of South America and the port of Valparaiso.
+
+Strange to say, none of our mutineers objected to this, and after dark,
+as we tore along before a full-sized gale, I sent my own men up on top
+the chart-house to take the gaskets off the spanker. This was the only
+sail we could set and trim and in every way control. It is true the
+mizzen-braces were still rigged aft to the poop, according to Horn
+practice. But, while we could thus trim the mizzen-yards, the sails
+themselves, in setting or furling, were in the hands of the for’ard
+crowd.
+
+Margaret, beside me in the darkness at the break of the poop, put her
+hand in mine with a warm pressure, as both our tiny watches swayed up
+the spanker and as both of us held our breaths in an effort to feel the
+added draw in the _Elsinore’s_ speed.
+
+“I never wanted to marry a sailor,” she said. “And I thought I was safe
+in the hands of a landsman like you. And yet here you are, with all the
+stuff of the sea in you, running down your easting for port. Next
+thing, I suppose, I’ll see you out with a sextant, shooting the sun or
+making star-observations.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+
+Four more days have passed; the gale has blown itself out; we are not
+more than three hundred and fifty miles off Valparaiso; and the
+_Elsinore_, this time due to me and my own stubbornness, is rolling in
+the wind and heading nowhere in a light breeze at the rate of nothing
+but driftage per hour.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in the three days and nights of the gale,
+we logged as much as eight, and even nine, knots. What bothered me was
+the acquiescence of the mutineers in my programme. They were sensible
+enough in the simple matter of geography to know what I was doing. They
+had control of the sails, and yet they permitted me to run for the
+South American coast.
+
+More than that, as the gale eased on the morning of the third day, they
+actually went aloft, set top-gallant-sails, royals, and skysails, and
+trimmed the yards to the quartering breeze. This was too much for the
+Saxon streak in me, whereupon I wore the _Elsinore_ about before the
+wind, fetched her up upon it, and lashed the wheel. Margaret and I are
+agreed in the hypothesis that their plan is to get inshore until land
+is sighted, at which time they will desert in the boats.
+
+“But we don’t want them to desert,” she proclaims with flashing eyes.
+“We are bound for Seattle. They must return to duty. They’ve got to,
+soon, for they are beginning to starve.”
+
+“There isn’t a navigator aft,” I oppose.
+
+Promptly she withers me with her scorn.
+
+“You, a master of books, by all the sea-blood in your body should be
+able to pick up the theoretics of navigation while I snap my fingers.
+Furthermore, remember that I can supply the seamanship. Why, any
+squarehead peasant, in a six months’ cramming course at any seaport
+navigation school, can pass the examiners for his navigator’s papers.
+That means six hours for you. And less. If you can’t, after an hour’s
+reading and an hour’s practice with the sextant, take a latitude
+observation and work it out, I’ll do it for you.”
+
+“You mean you know?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“I mean, from the little I know, that I know I can learn to know a
+meridian sight and the working out of it. I mean that I can learn to
+know inside of two hours.”
+
+Strange to say, the gale, after easing to a mild breeze, recrudesced in
+a sort of after-clap. With sails untrimmed and flapping, the consequent
+smashing, crashing, and rending of our gear can be imagined. It brought
+out in alarm every man for’ard.
+
+“Trim the yards!” I yelled at Bert Rhine, who, backed for counsel by
+Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney, actually came directly beneath
+me on the main deck in order to hear above the commotion aloft.
+
+“Keep a-runnin, an’ you won’t have to trim,” the gangster shouted up to
+me.
+
+“Want to make land, eh?” I girded down at him. “Getting hungry, eh?
+Well, you won’t make land or anything else in a thousand years once you
+get all your top-hamper piled down on deck.”
+
+I have forgotten to state that this occurred at midday yesterday.
+
+“What are you goin’ to do if we trim?” Charles Davis broke in.
+
+“Run off shore,” I replied, “and get your gang out in deep sea where it
+will be starved back to duty.”
+
+“We’ll furl, an’ let you heave to,” the gangster proposed.
+
+I shook my head and held up my rifle. “You’ll have to go aloft to do
+it, and the first man that gets into the shrouds will get this.”
+
+“Then she can go to hell for all we care,” he said, with emphatic
+conclusiveness.
+
+And just then the fore-topgallant-yard carried away—luckily as the bow
+was down-pitched into a trough of sea-and when the slow, confused, and
+tangled descent was accomplished the big stick lay across the wreck of
+both bulwarks and of that portion of the bridge between the foremast
+and the forecastle head.
+
+Bert Rhine heard, but could not see, the damage wrought. He looked up
+at me challengingly, and sneered:
+
+“Want some more to come down?”
+
+It could not have happened more apropos. The port-brace, and
+immediately afterwards the starboard-brace, of the crojack-yard—carried
+away. This was the big, lowest spar on the mizzen, and as the huge
+thing of steel swung wildly back and forth the gangster and his
+followers turned and crouched as they looked up to see. Next, the
+gooseneck of the truss, on which it pivoted, smashed away. Immediately
+the lifts and lower-topsail sheets parted, and with a fore-and-aft
+pitch of the ship the spar up-ended and crashed to the deck upon Number
+Three hatch, destroying that section of the bridge in its fall.
+
+All this was new to the gangster—as it was to me—but Charles Davis and
+the Maltese Cockney thoroughly apprehended the situation.
+
+“Stand out from under!” I yelled sardonically; and the three of them
+cowered and shrank away as their eyes sought aloft for what new spar
+was thundering down upon them.
+
+The lower-topsail, its sheets parted by the fall of the crojack-yard,
+was tearing out of the bolt-ropes and ribboning away to leeward and
+making such an uproar that they might well expect its yard to carry
+away. Since this wreckage of our beautiful gear was all new to me, I
+was quite prepared to see the thing happen.
+
+The gangster-leader, no sailor, but, after months at sea, intelligent
+enough and nervously strong enough to appreciate the danger, turned his
+head and looked up at me. And I will do him the credit to say that he
+took his time while all our world of gear aloft seemed smashing to
+destruction.
+
+“I guess we’ll trim yards,” he capitulated.
+
+“Better get the skysails and royals off,” Margaret said in my ear.
+
+“While you’re about it, get in the skysails and royals!” I shouted
+down. “And make a decent job of the gasketing!”
+
+Both Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney advertised their relief in
+their faces as they heard my words, and, at a nod from the gangster,
+they started for’ard on the run to put the orders into effect.
+
+Never, in the whole voyage, did our crew spring to it in more lively
+fashion. And lively fashion was needed to save our gear. As it was,
+they cut away the remnants of the mizzen-lower-topsail with their
+sheath-knives, and they loosed the main-skysail out of its bolt-ropes.
+
+The first infraction of our agreement was on the main-lower-topsail.
+This they attempted to furl. The carrying away of the crojack and the
+blowing away of the mizzen-lower-topsail gave me freedom to see and
+aim, and when the tiny messengers from my rifle began to spat through
+the canvas and to spat against the steel of the yard, the men strung
+along it desisted from passing the gaskets. I waved my will to Bert
+Rhine, who acknowledged me and ordered the sail set again and the yard
+trimmed.
+
+“What is the use of running off-shore?” I said to Margaret, when the
+kites were snugged down and all yards trimmed on the wind. “Three
+hundred and fifty miles off the land is as good as thirty-five hundred
+so far as starvation is concerned.”
+
+So, instead of making speed through the water toward deep sea, I hove
+the _Elsinore_ to on the starboard tack with no more than leeway
+driftage to the west and south.
+
+But our gallant mutineers had their will of us that very night. In the
+darkness we could hear the work aloft going on as yards were run down,
+sheets let go, and sails clew up and gasketed. I did try a few random
+shots, and all my reward was to hear the whine and creak of ropes
+through sheaves and to receive an equally random fire of
+revolver-shots.
+
+It is a most curious situation. We of the high place are masters of the
+steering of the _Elsinore_, while those for’ard are masters of the
+motor power. The only sail that is wholly ours is the spanker. They
+control absolutely—sheets, halyards, clewlines, buntlines, braces, and
+down-hauls—every sail on the fore and main. We control the braces on
+the mizzen, although they control the canvas on the mizzen. For that
+matter, Margaret and I fail to comprehend why they do not go aloft any
+dark night and sever the mizzen-braces at the yard-ends. All that
+prevents this, we are decided, is laziness. For if they did sever the
+braces that lead aft into our hands, they would be compelled to rig new
+braces for’ard in some fashion, else, in the rolling, would the
+mizzenmast be stripped of every spar.
+
+And still the mutiny we are enduring is ridiculous and grotesque. There
+was never a mutiny like it. It violates all standards and precedents.
+In the old classic mutinies, long ere this, attacking like tigers, the
+seamen should have swarmed over the poop and killed most of us or been
+most of them killed.
+
+Wherefore I sneer at our gallant mutineers, and recommend trained
+nurses for them, quite in the manner of Mr. Pike. But Margaret shakes
+her head and insists that human nature is human nature, and that under
+similar circumstances human nature will express itself similarly. In
+short, she points to the number of deaths that have already occurred,
+and declares that on some dark night, sooner or later, whenever the
+pinch of hunger sufficiently sharpens, we shall see our rascals
+storming aft.
+
+And in the meantime, except for the tenseness of it, and for the
+incessant watchfulness which Margaret and I alone maintain, it is more
+like a mild adventure, more like a page out of some book of romance
+which ends happily.
+
+It is surely romance, watch and watch for a man and a woman who love,
+to relieve each other’s watches. Each such relief is a love passage and
+unforgettable. Never was there wooing like it—the muttered surmises of
+wind and weather, the whispered councils, the kissed commands in palms
+of hands, the dared contacts of the dark.
+
+Oh, truly, I have often, since this voyage began, told the books to go
+hang. And yet the books are at the back of the race-life of me. I am
+what I am out of ten thousand generations of my kind. Of that there is
+no discussion. And yet my midnight philosophy stands the test of my
+breed. I must have selected my books out of the ten thousand
+generations that compose me. I have killed a man—Steve Roberts. As a
+perishing blond without an alphabet I should have done this
+unwaveringly. As a perishing blond with an alphabet, plus the contents
+in my brain of the philosophizing of all philosophers, I have killed
+this same man with the same unwaveringness. Culture has not emasculated
+me. I am quite unaffected. It was in the day’s work, and my kind have
+always been day-workers, doing the day’s work, whatever it might be, in
+high adventure or dull ploddingness, and always doing it.
+
+Never would I ask to set back the dial of time or event. I would kill
+Steve Roberts again, under the same circumstances, as a matter of
+course. When I say I am unaffected by this happening I do not quite
+mean it. I am affected. I am aware that the spirit of me is informed
+with a sober elation of efficiency. I have done something that had to
+be done, as any man will do what has to be done in the course of the
+day’s work.
+
+Yes, I am a perishing blond, and a man, and I sit in the high place and
+bend the stupid ones to my will; and I am a lover, loving a royal woman
+of my own perishing breed, and together we occupy, and shall occupy,
+the high place of government and command until our kind perish from the
+earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+
+Margaret was right. The mutiny is not violating standards and
+precedents. We have had our hands full for days and nights. Ditman
+Olansen, the crank-eyed Berserker, has been killed by Wada, and the
+training-ship boy, the one lone cadet of our breed, has gone overside
+with the regulation sack of coal at his feet. The poop has been rushed.
+My illuminating invention has proved a success. The men are getting
+hungry, and we still sit in command in the high place.
+
+First of all the attack on the poop, two nights ago, in Margaret’s
+watch. No; first, I have made another invention. Assisted by the old
+steward, who knows, as a Chinese ought, a deal about fireworks, and
+getting my materials from our signal rockets and Roman candles, I
+manufactured half a dozen bombs. I don’t really think they are very
+deadly, and I know our extemporized fuses are slower than our voyage is
+at the present time; but nevertheless the bombs have served the
+purpose, as you shall see.
+
+And now to the attempt to rush the poop. It was in Margaret’s watch,
+from midnight till four in the morning, when the attack was made.
+Sleeping on the deck by the cabin skylight, I was very close to her
+when her revolver went off, and continued to go off.
+
+My first spring was to the tripping-lines on my illuminators. The
+igniting and releasing devices worked cleverly. I pulled two of the
+tripping-lines, and two of the contraptions exploded into light and
+noise and at the same time ran automatically down the
+jigger-trysail-stays, and automatically fetched up at the ends of their
+lines. The illumination was instantaneous and gorgeous. Henry, the two
+sail-makers, and the steward—at least three of them awakened from sound
+sleep, I am sure—ran to join us along the break of the poop. All the
+advantage lay with us, for we were in the dark, while our foes were
+outlined against the light behind them.
+
+But such light! The powder crackled, fizzed, and spluttered and spilled
+out the excess of gasolene from the flaming oakum balls so that streams
+of fire dripped down on the main deck beneath. And the stuff of the
+signal-flares dripped red light and blue and green.
+
+There was not much of a fight, for the mutineers were shocked by our
+fireworks. Margaret fired her revolver haphazardly, while I held my
+rifle for any that gained the poop. But the attack faded away as
+quickly as it had come. I did see Margaret overshoot some man, scaling
+the poop from the port-rail, and the next moment I saw Wada, charging
+like a buffalo, jab him in the chest with the spear he had made and
+thrust the boarder back and down.
+
+That was all. The rest retreated for’ard on the dead run, while the
+three trysails, furled at the foot of the stays next to the mizzen and
+set on fire by the dripping gasolene, went up in flame and burned
+entirely away and out without setting the rest of the ship on fire.
+That is one of the virtues of a ship steel-masted and steel-stayed.
+
+And on the deck beneath us, crumpled, twisted, face hidden so that we
+could not identify him, lay the man whom Wada had speared.
+
+And now I come to a phase of adventure that is new to me. I have never
+found it in the books. In short, it is carelessness coupled with
+laziness, or vice versa. I had used two of my illuminators. Only one
+remained. An hour later, convinced of the movement aft of men along the
+deck, I let go the third and last and with its brightness sent them
+scurrying for’ard. Whether they were attacking the poop tentatively to
+learn whether or not I had exhausted my illuminators, or whether or not
+they were trying to rescue Ditman Olansen, we shall never know. The
+point is: they did come aft; they were compelled to retreat by my
+illuminator; and it was my last illuminator. And yet I did not start
+in, there and then, to manufacture fresh ones. This was carelessness.
+It was laziness. And I hazarded our lives, perhaps, if you please, on a
+psychological guess that I had convinced our mutineers that we had an
+inexhaustible stock of illuminators in reserve.
+
+The rest of Margaret’s watch, which I shared with her, was undisturbed.
+At four I insisted that she go below and turn in, but she compromised
+by taking my own bed behind the skylight.
+
+At break of day I was able to make out the body, still lying as last I
+had seen it. At seven o’clock, before breakfast, and while Margaret
+still slept, I sent the two boys, Henry and Buckwheat, down to the
+body. I stood above them, at the rail, rifle in hand and ready. But
+from for’ard came no signs of life; and the lads, between them, rolled
+the crank-eyed Norwegian over so that we could recognize him, carried
+him to the rail, and shoved him stiffly across and into the sea. Wada’s
+spear-thrust had gone clear through him.
+
+But before twenty-four hours were up the mutineers evened the score
+handsomely. They more than evened it, for we are so few that we cannot
+so well afford the loss of one as they can. To begin with—and a thing I
+had anticipated and for which I had prepared my bombs—while Margaret
+and I ate a deck-breakfast in the shelter of the jiggermast a number of
+the men sneaked aft and got under the overhang of the poop. Buckwheat
+saw them coming and yelled the alarm, but it was too late. There was no
+direct way to get them out. The moment I put my head over the rail to
+fire at them, I knew they would fire up at me with all the advantage in
+their favour. They were hidden. I had to expose myself.
+
+Two steel doors, tight-fastened and caulked against the Cape Horn seas,
+opened under the overhang of the poop from the cabin on to the main
+deck. These doors the men proceeded to attack with sledge-hammers,
+while the rest of the gang, sheltered by the ’midship-house, showed
+that it stood ready for the rush when the doors were battered down.
+
+Inside, the steward guarded one door with his hacking knife, while with
+his spear Wada guarded the other door. Nor, while I had dispatched them
+to this duty, was I idle. Behind the jiggermast I lighted the fuse of
+one of my extemporized bombs. When it was sputtering nicely I ran
+across the poop to the break and dropped the bomb to the main deck
+beneath, at the same time making an effort to toss it in under the
+overhang where the men battered at the port-door. But this effort was
+distracted and made futile by a popping of several revolver shots from
+the gangways amidships. One _is_ jumpy when soft-nosed bullets
+putt-putt around him. As a result, the bomb rolled about on the open
+deck.
+
+Nevertheless, the illuminators had earned the respect of the mutineers
+for my fireworks. The sputtering and fizzling of the fuse were too much
+for them, and from under the poop they ran for’ard like so many
+scuttling rabbits. I know I could have got a couple with my rifle had I
+not been occupied with lighting the fuse of a second bomb. Margaret
+managed three wild shots with her revolver, and the poop was
+immediately peppered by a scattering revolver fire from for’ard.
+
+Being provident (and lazy, for I have learned that it takes time and
+labour to manufacture home-made bombs), I pinched off the live end of
+the fuse in my hand. But the fuse of the first bomb, rolling about on
+the main deck, merely fizzled on; and as I waited I resolved to shorten
+my remaining fuses. Any of the men who fled, had he had the courage,
+could have pinched off the fuse, or tossed the bomb overboard, or,
+better yet, he could have tossed it up amongst us on the poop.
+
+It took fully five minutes for that blessed fuse to burn its slow
+length, and when the bomb did go off it was a sad disappointment. I
+swear it could have been sat upon with nothing more than a jar to one’s
+nerves. And yet, in so far as the intimidation goes, it did its work.
+The men have not since ventured under the overhang of the poop.
+
+That the mutineers were getting short of food was patent. The
+_Elsinore_, sailless, drifted about that morning, the sport of wind and
+wave; and the gang put many lines overboard for the catching of
+mollyhawks and albatrosses. Oh, I worried the hungry fishers with my
+rifle. No man could show himself for’ard without having a bullet whop
+against the iron-work perilously near him. And still they caught
+birds—not, however, without danger to themselves, and not without
+numerous losses of birds due to my rifle.
+
+Their procedure was to toss their hooks and bait over the rail from
+shelter and slowly to pay the lines out as the slight windage of the
+_Elsinore’s_ hull, spars, and rigging drifted her through the water.
+When a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter,
+till it was alongside. This was the ticklish moment. The hook, merely a
+hollow and acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on a piece of
+board at the end of the line, held the bird by pinching its curved beak
+into the acute angle. The moment the line slacked the bird was
+released. So, when alongside, this was the problem: to lift the bird
+out of the water, straight up the side of the ship, without once
+jamming and easing and slacking. When they tried to do this from
+shelter invariably they lost the bird.
+
+They worked out a method. When the bird was alongside the several men
+with revolvers turned loose on me, while one man, overhauling and
+keeping the line taut, leaped to the rail and quickly hove the bird up
+and over and inboard. I know this long-distance revolver fire seriously
+bothered me. One cannot help jumping when death, in the form of a piece
+of flying lead, hits the rail beside him, or the mast over his head, or
+whines away in a ricochet from the steel shrouds. Nevertheless, I
+managed with my rifle to bother the exposed men on the rail to the
+extent that they lost one hooked bird out of two. And twenty-six men
+require a quantity of albatrosses and mollyhawks every twenty-four
+hours, while they can fish only in the daylight.
+
+As the day wore along I improved on my obstructive tactics. When the
+_Elsinore_ was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found
+that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could
+swing her bow off. Then, when she had paid off till the wind was abeam,
+by reversing the wheel hard across to the opposite hard-over I could
+take advantage of her momentum away from the wind and work her off
+squarely before it. This made all the wood-floated triangles of
+bird-snares tow aft along her sides.
+
+The first time I was ready for them. With hooks and sinkers on our own
+lines aft, we tossed out, grappled, captured, and broke off nine of
+their lines. But the next time, so slow is the movement of so large a
+ship, the mutineers hauled all their lines safely inboard ere they
+towed aft within striking distance of my grapnels.
+
+Still I improved. As long as I kept the _Elsinore_ before the wind they
+could not fish. I experimented. Once before it, by means of a
+winged-out spanker coupled with patient and careful steering, I could
+keep her before it. This I did, hour by hour one of my men relieving
+another at the wheel. As a result all fishing ceased.
+
+Margaret was holding the first dog-watch, four to six. Henry was at the
+wheel steering. Wada and Louis were below cooking the evening meal over
+the big coal-stove and the oil-burners. I had just come up from below
+and was standing beside the sounding-machine, not half a dozen feet
+from Henry at the wheel. Some obscure sound from the ventilator must
+have attracted me, for I was gazing at it when the thing happened.
+
+But first, the ventilator. This is a steel shaft that leads up from the
+coal-carrying bowels of the ship beneath the lazarette and that wins to
+the outside-world via the after-wall of the chart-house. In fact, it
+occupies the hollow inside of the double walls of the afterwall of the
+chart-house. Its opening, at the height of a man’s head, is screened
+with iron bars so closely set that no mature-bodied rat can squeeze
+between. Also, this opening commands the wheel, which is a scant
+fifteen feet away and directly across the booby-hatch. Some mutineer,
+crawling along the space between the coal and the deck of the lower
+hold, had climbed the ventilator shaft and was able to take aim through
+the slits between the bars.
+
+Practically simultaneously, I saw the out-rush of smoke and heard the
+report. I heard a grunt from Henry, and, turning my head, saw him cling
+to the spokes and turn the wheel half a revolution as he sank to the
+deck. It must have been a lucky shot. The boy was perforated through
+the heart or very near to the heart—we have no time for post-mortems on
+the _Elsinore_.
+
+Tom Spink and the second sail-maker, Uchino, sprang to Henry’s side.
+The revolver continued to go off through the ventilator slits, and the
+bullets thudded into the front of the half wheel-house all about them.
+Fortunately they were not hit, and they immediately scrambled out of
+range. The boy quivered for the space of a few seconds, and ceased to
+move; and one more cadet of the perishing breed perished as he did his
+day’s work at the wheel of the _Elsinore_ off the west coast of South
+America, bound from Baltimore to Seattle with a cargo of coal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII.
+
+
+The situation is hopelessly grotesque. We in the high place command the
+food of the _Elsinore_, but the mutineers have captured her
+steering-gear. That is to say, they have captured it without coming
+into possession of it. They cannot steer, neither can we. The poop,
+which is the high place, is ours. The wheel is on the poop, yet we
+cannot touch the wheel. From that slitted opening in the
+ventilator-shaft they are able to shoot down any man who approaches the
+wheel. And with that steel wall of the chart-house as a shield they
+laugh at us as from a conning tower.
+
+I have a plan, but it is not worth while putting into execution unless
+its need becomes imperative. In the darkness of night it would be an
+easy trick to disconnect the steering-gear from the short tiller on the
+rudder-head, and then, by re-rigging the preventer tackles, steer from
+both sides of the poop well enough for’ard to be out of the range of
+the ventilator.
+
+In the meantime, in this fine weather, the _Elsinore_ drifts as she
+lists, or as the windage of her lists and the sea-movement of waves
+lists. And she can well drift. Let the mutineers starve. They can best
+be brought to their senses through their stomachs.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And what are wits for, if not for use? I am breaking the men’s hungry
+hearts. It is great fun in its way. The mollyhawks and albatrosses,
+after their fashion, have followed the _Elsinore_ up out of their own
+latitudes. This means that there are only so many of them and that
+their numbers are not recruited. Syllogism: major premise, a definite
+and limited amount of bird-meat; minor premise, the only food the
+mutineers now have is bird-meat; conclusion, destroy the available food
+and the mutineers will be compelled to come back to duty.
+
+I have acted on this bit of logic. I began experimentally by tossing
+small chunks of fat pork and crusts of stale bread overside. When the
+birds descended for the feast I shot them. Every carcass thus left
+floating on the surface of the sea was so much less meat for the
+mutineers.
+
+But I bettered the method. Yesterday I overhauled the medicine-chest,
+and I dosed my chunks of fat pork and bread with the contents of every
+bottle that bore a label of skull and cross-bones. I even added
+rough-on-rats to the deadliness of the mixture—this on the suggestion
+of the steward.
+
+And to-day, behold, there is no bird left in the sky. True, while I
+played my game yesterday, the mutineers hooked a few of the birds; but
+now the rest are gone, and that is bound to be the last food for the
+men for’ard until they resume duty.
+
+Yes; it is grotesque. It is a boy’s game. It reads like Midshipman
+Easy, like Frank Mildmay, like Frank Reade, Jr.; and yet, i’ faith,
+life and death’s in the issue. I have just gone over the toll of our
+dead since the voyage began.
+
+First, was Christian Jespersen, killed by O’Sullivan when that maniac
+aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay’s sea-boots; then O’Sullivan,
+because he interfered with Charles Davis’ sleep, brained by that worthy
+with a steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we began
+the passage of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly by the gangster clique,
+his life cut out of him with knives, his carcass left lying on deck to
+be found by us and be buried by us; and the Samurai, Captain West, a
+sudden though not a violent death, albeit occurring in the midst of all
+elemental violence as Mr. Pike clawed the _Elsinore_ off the lee-shore
+of the Horn; and Boney the Splinter, following, washed overboard to
+drown as we cleared the sea-gashing rock-tooth where the southern tip
+of the continent bit into the storm-wrath of the Antarctic; and the
+big-footed, clumsy youth of a Finnish carpenter, hove overside as a
+Jonah by his fellows who believed that Finns control the winds; and
+Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley, Rome and Ireland, shot down on the poop
+and flung overboard alive by Mr. Pike, still alive and clinging to the
+log-line, cut adrift by the steward to be eaten alive by great-beaked
+albatrosses, mollyhawks, and sooty-plumaged Cape hens; Steve Roberts,
+one-time cowboy, shot by me as he tried to shoot me; Herman
+Lunkenheimer, his throat cut before all of us by the hound Bombini as
+Kid Twist stretched the throat taut from behind; the two mates, Mr.
+Pike and Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in what must have
+been an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by Wada as he
+charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to rush the
+poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at the
+wheel, from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his day’s work.
+
+No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just made
+I see that we are not playing a boy’s game. Why, we have lost a third
+of us, and the bloodiest battles of history have rarely achieved such a
+percentage of mortality. Fourteen of us have gone overside, and who can
+tell the end?
+
+Nevertheless, here we are, masters of matter, adventurers in the
+micro-organic, planet-weighers, sun-analysers, star-rovers,
+god-dreamers, equipped with the human wisdom of all the ages, and yet,
+quoting Mr. Pike, to come down to brass tacks, we are a lot of
+primitive beasts, fighting bestially, slaying bestially, pursuing
+bestially food and water, air for our lungs, a dry space above the
+deep, and carcasses skin-covered and intact. And over this menagerie of
+beasts Margaret and I, with our Asiatics under us, rule top-dog. We are
+all dogs—there is no getting away from it. And we, the fair-pigmented
+ones, by the seed of our ancestry rulers in the high place, shall
+remain top-dog over the rest of the dogs. Oh, there is material in
+plenty for the cogitation of any philosopher on a windjammer in mutiny
+in this Year of our Lord 1913.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Henry was the fourteenth of us to go overside into the dark and salty
+disintegration of the sea. And in one day he has been well avenged; for
+two of the mutineers have followed him. The steward called my attention
+to what was taking place. He touched my arm half beyond his servant’s
+self, as he gloated for’ard at the men heaving two corpses overside.
+Weighted with coal, they sank immediately, so that we could not
+identify them.
+
+“They have been fighting,” I said. “It is good that they should fight
+among themselves.”
+
+But the old Chinese merely grinned and shook his head.
+
+“You don’t think they have been fighting?” I queried.
+
+“No fight. They eat’m mollyhawk and albatross; mollyhawk and albatross
+eat’m fat pork; two men he die, plenty men much sick, you bet, damn to
+hell me very much glad. I savve.”
+
+And I think he was right. While I was busy baiting the sea-birds the
+mutineers were catching them, and of a surety they must have caught
+some that had eaten of my various poisons.
+
+The two poisoned ones went over the side yesterday. Since then we have
+taken the census. Two men only have not appeared, and they are Bob, the
+fat and overgrown feebling youth, and, of all creatures, the Faun. It
+seems my fate that I had to destroy the Faun—the poor, tortured Faun,
+always willing and eager, ever desirous to please. There is a madness
+of ill luck in all this. Why couldn’t the two dead men have been
+Charles Davis and Tony the Greek? Or Bert Rhine and Kid Twist? or
+Bombini and Andy Fay? Yes, and in my heart I know I should have felt
+better had it been Isaac Chantz and Arthur Deacon, or Nancy and Sundry
+Buyers, or Shorty and Larry.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+The steward has just tendered me a respectful bit of advice.
+
+“Next time we chuck’m overboard like Henry, much better we use old
+iron.”
+
+“Getting short of coal?” I asked.
+
+He nodded affirmation. We use a great deal of coal in our cooking, and
+when the present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a
+bulkhead to get at the cargo.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX.
+
+
+The situation grows tense. There are no more sea-birds, and the
+mutineers are starving. Yesterday I talked with Bert Rhine. To-day I
+talked with him again, and he will never forget, I am certain, the
+little talk we had this morning.
+
+To begin with, last evening, at five o’clock, I heard his voice issuing
+from between the slits of the ventilator in the after-wall of the
+chart-house. Standing at the corner of the house, quite out of range, I
+answered him.
+
+“Getting hungry?” I jeered. “Let me tell you what we are going to have
+for dinner. I have just been down and seen the preparations. Now,
+listen: first, caviare on toast; then, clam bouillon; and creamed
+lobster; and tinned lamb chops with French peas—you know, the peas that
+melt in one’s mouth; and California asparagus with mayonnaise; and—oh,
+I forgot to mention fried potatoes and cold pork and beans; and peach
+pie; and coffee, real coffee. Doesn’t it make you hungry for your East
+Side? And, say, think of the free lunch going to waste right now in a
+thousand saloons in good old New York.”
+
+I had told him the truth. The dinner I described (principally coming
+out of tins and bottles, to be sure) was the dinner we were to eat.
+
+“Cut that,” he snarled. “I want to talk business with _you_.”
+
+“Right down to brass tacks,” I gibed. “Very well, when are you and the
+rest of your rats going to turn to?”
+
+“Cut that,” he reiterated. “I’ve got you where 1 want you now. Take it
+from me, I’m givin’ it straight. I’m not tellin’ you how, but I’ve got
+you under my thumb. When I come down on you, you’ll crack.”
+
+“Hell is full of cocksure rats like you,” I retorted; although I never
+dreamed how soon he would be writhing in the particular hell preparing
+for him.
+
+“Forget it,” he sneered back. “I’ve got you where I want you. I’m just
+tellin’ you, that’s all.”
+
+“Pardon me,” I replied, “when I tell you that I’m from Missouri. You’ll
+have to show _me_.”
+
+And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I
+naturally sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to make
+myself intelligible to him. The situation was bestial, with sixteen of
+our complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I employed,
+perforce, were terms of bestiality. And I thought, also, of I who was
+thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the utopians, the visions of
+the poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in a discussion with
+this ripened product of the New York City inferno. To him I must talk
+in the elemental terms of life and death, of food and water, of
+brutality and cruelty.
+
+“I give you your choice,” he went on. “Give in now, an’ you won’t be
+hurt, none of you.”
+
+“And if we don’t?” I dared airily.
+
+“You’ll be sorry you was ever born. You ain’t a mush-head, you’ve got a
+girl there that’s stuck on you. It’s about time you think of her. You
+ain’t altogether a mutt. You get my drive?”
+
+Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of all
+I had ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at Peking, and
+of the plans of the white men for their womenkind in the event of the
+yellow hordes breaking through the last lines of defence. Ay, and the
+old steward got it; for I saw his black eyes glint murderously in their
+narrow, tilted slits. He knew the drift of the gangster’s meaning.
+
+“You get my drive?” the gangster repeated.
+
+And I knew anger. Not ordinary anger, but cold anger. And I caught a
+vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the ages in
+all lands, on all seas. I saw my kind, our women with us, in forlorn
+hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in jungle
+fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking ships. And
+always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts. We might die, our
+women with us; but, living, we had ruled. It was a royal vision I
+glimpsed. Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the ethic, which was
+the stuff of the fabric of which it was builded. It was the sacred
+trust of the seed, the bequest of duty handed down from all ancestors.
+
+And I flamed more coldly. It was not red-brute anger. It was
+intellectual. It was based on concept and history; it was the
+philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in their
+own strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the rightness of the
+books, the relation of high thinking to high-conduct, the transmutation
+of midnight thought into action in the high place on the poop of a
+coal-carrier in the year nineteen-thirteen, my woman beside me, my
+ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed servitors under me, the beasts
+beneath me and beneath the heel of me. God! I felt kingly. I knew at
+last the meaning of kingship.
+
+My anger was white and cold. This subterranean rat of a miserable
+human, crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and mine!
+A rat in the shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-like as any
+rat ever made! And it was in this spirit that I answered the gangster.
+
+“When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad light
+of day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience, and when
+you show by your every action that you like it and are glad to do it,
+then, and not until then, will I talk with you.”
+
+Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate
+of his kind at me through the slits in the ventilator. But I made no
+reply. I listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew why
+the English had blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of cannon
+in India long years ago.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-gallon
+carboy of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended for it.
+
+In the meantime I was devising another way to overcome that deadly
+ventilator shaft. The scheme was so simple that I was shamed in that it
+had not occurred to me at the very beginning. The slitted opening was
+small. Two sacks of flour, in a wooden frame, suspended by ropes from
+the edge of the chart-house roof directly above, would effectually
+cover the opening and block all revolver fire.
+
+No sooner thought than done. Tom Spink and Louis were on top the
+chart-house with me and preparing to lower the flour, when we heard a
+voice issuing from the shaft.
+
+“Who’s in there now?” I demanded. “Speak up.”
+
+“I’m givin’ you a last chance,” Bert Rhine answered.
+
+And just then, around the corner of the house, stepped the steward. In
+his hand he carried a large galvanized pail, and my casual thought was
+that he had come to get rain-water from the barrels. Even as I thought
+it, he made a sweeping half-circle with the pail and sloshed its
+contents into the ventilator-opening. And even as the liquid flew
+through the air I knew it for what it was—undiluted sulphuric acid, two
+gallons of it from the carboy.
+
+The gangster must have received the liquid fire in the face and eyes.
+And, in the shock of pain, he must have released all holds and fallen
+upon the coal at the bottom of the shaft. His cries and shrieks of
+anguish were terrible, and I was reminded of the starving rats which
+had squealed up that same shaft during the first months of the voyage.
+The thing was sickening. I prefer that men be killed cleanly and
+easily.
+
+The agony of the wretch I did not fully realize until the steward, his
+bare fore-arms sprayed by the splash from the ventilator slats,
+suddenly felt the bite of the acid through his tight, whole skin and
+made a mad rush for the water-barrel at the corner of the house. And
+Bert Rhine, the silent man of soundless laughter, screaming below there
+on the coal, was enduring the bite of the acid in his eyes!
+
+We covered the ventilator opening with our flour-device; the screams
+from below ceased as the victim was evidently dragged for’ard across
+the coal by his mates; and yet I confess to a miserable forenoon. As
+Carlyle has said: “Death is easy; all men must die”; but to receive two
+gallons of full-strength sulphuric acid full in the face is a vastly
+different and vastly more horrible thing than merely to die.
+Fortunately, Margaret was below at the time, and, after a few minutes,
+in which I recovered my balance, I bullied and swore all our hands into
+keeping the happening from her.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Oh, well, and we have got ours in retaliation. Off and on, through all
+of yesterday, after the ventilator tragedy, there were noises beneath
+the cabin floor or deck. We heard them under the dining-table, under
+the steward’s pantry, under Margaret’s stateroom.
+
+This deck is overlaid with wood, but under the wood is iron, or steel
+rather, such as of which the whole _Elsinore_ is builded.
+
+Margaret and I, followed by Louis, Wada, and the steward, walked about
+from place to place, wherever the sounds arose of tappings and of
+cold-chisels against iron. The tappings seemed to come from everywhere;
+but we concluded that the concentration necessary on any spot to make
+an opening large enough for a man’s body would inevitably draw our
+attention to that spot. And, as Margaret said:
+
+“If they do manage to cut through, they must come up head-first, and,
+in such emergence, what chance would they have against us?”
+
+So I relieved Buckwheat from deck duty, placed him on watch over the
+cabin floor, to be relieved by the steward in Margaret’s watches.
+
+In the late afternoon, after prodigious hammerings and clangings in a
+score of places, all noises ceased. Neither in the first and second
+dog-watches, nor in the first watch of the night, were the noises
+resumed. When I took charge of the poop at midnight Buckwheat relieved
+the steward in the vigil over the cabin floor; and as I leaned on the
+rail at the break of the poop, while my four hours dragged slowly by,
+least of all did I apprehend danger from the cabin—especially when I
+considered the two-gallon pail of raw sulphuric acid ready to hand for
+the first head that might arise through an opening in the floor not yet
+made. Our rascals for’ard might scale the poop; or cross aloft from
+mizzenmast to jigger and descend upon our heads; but how they could
+invade us through the floor was beyond me.
+
+But they did invade. A modern ship is a complex affair. How was I to
+guess the manner of the invasion?
+
+It was two in the morning, and for an hour I had been puzzling my head
+with watching the smoke arise from the after-division of the
+for’ard-house and with wondering why the mutineers should have up steam
+in the donkey-engine at such an ungodly hour. Not on the whole voyage
+had the donkey-engine been used. Four bells had just struck, and I was
+leaning on the rail at the break of the poop when I heard a prodigious
+coughing and choking from aft. Next, Wada ran across the deck to me.
+
+“Big trouble with Buckwheat,” he blurted at me. “You go quick.”
+
+I shoved him my rifle and left him on guard while I raced around the
+chart-house. A lighted match, in the hands of Tom Spink, directed me.
+Between the booby-hatch and the wheel, sitting up and rocking back and
+forth with wringings of hands and wavings of arms, tears of agony
+bursting from his eyes, was Buckwheat. My first thought was that in
+some stupid way he had got the acid into his own eyes. But the terrible
+fashion in which he coughed and strangled would quickly have undeceived
+me, had not Louis, bending over the booby-companion, uttered a startled
+exclamation.
+
+I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made me
+catch my breath and gasp. I had inhaled sulphur. On the instant I
+forgot the _Elsinore_, the mutineers for’ard, everything save one
+thing.
+
+The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily about
+the big after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and strangled me.
+By the dim light of a sea-lantern I saw the old steward, on hands and
+knees, coughing and gasping, the while he shook awake Yatsuda, the
+first sail-maker. Uchino, the second sail-maker, still strangled in his
+sleep.
+
+It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I
+proved it when I dropped on my hands and knees. I rolled Uchino out of
+his blankets with a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my head,
+face, and mouth, arose to my feet, and dashed for’ard into the hall.
+After a couple of collisions with the wood-work I again dropped to the
+floor and rearranged the blankets so that, while my mouth remained
+covered, I could draw or withdraw, a thickness across my eyes.
+
+The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the
+dizziness I suffered. I blundered into the steward’s pantry, and out of
+it, missed the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard opening
+in the long hall, and found myself bent double by violent collision
+with the dining-room table.
+
+But I had my bearings. Feeling my way around the table and bumping most
+of the poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied stove, I
+emerged in the cross-hall and made my way to starboard. Here, at the
+base of the chart-room stairway, I gained the hall that led aft. By
+this time my own situation seemed so serious that, careless of any
+collision, I went aft in long leaps.
+
+Margaret’s door was open. I plunged into her room. The moment I drew
+the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a modicum of
+what Bert Rhine must have suffered. Oh, the intolerable bite of the
+sulphur in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain! No light burned in the
+room. I could only strangle and stumble for’ard to Margaret’s bed, upon
+which I collapsed.
+
+She was not there. I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her
+body had left in the under-sheet. Even in my agony and helplessness the
+intimacy of that warmth her body had left was very dear to me. Between
+the lack of oxygen in my lungs (due to the blankets), the pain of the
+sulphur, and the mortal dizziness in my brain, I felt that I might well
+cease there where the linen warmed my hand.
+
+Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing from
+along the hall. It was new life to me. I fell from bed to floor and
+managed to get upright until I gained the hall, where again I fell.
+Thereafter I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the stairway. By
+means of the newel-post I drew myself upright and listened. Near me
+something moved and strangled. I fell upon it and found in my arms all
+the softness of Margaret.
+
+How describe that battle up the stairway? It was a crucifixion of
+struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony. Time after time, as my
+consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort
+and let myself blur down into the ultimate dark. I fought my way step
+by step. Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her body step
+by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell with it, and
+back with it, and lost much that had been so hardly gained. And yet out
+of it all this I remember: that warm soft body of hers was the dearest
+thing in the world—vastly more dear than the pleasant land I remotely
+remembered, than all the books and all the humans I had ever known,
+than the deck above, with its sweet pure air softly blowing under the
+cool starry sky.
+
+As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of leaving
+her there and saving myself never crossed my mind. The one place for me
+was where she was.
+
+Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not
+absurd during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway. One must
+taste death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive
+sanction for purple passages.
+
+And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed that
+upward way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out upon
+the poop might not be shut. Life and death lay right there in that one
+point of the issue. Was there any creature of my creatures aft with
+common sense and anticipation sufficient to make him think to open
+those doors? How I yearned for one man, for one proved henchman, such
+as Mr. Pike, to be on the poop! As it was, with the sole exception of
+Tom Spink and Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.
+
+I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my
+feet. Nor could I rise upright on my knees. I crawled like any
+four-legged animal—nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the
+deck. It was a matter of several feet to the doorway. I died a score of
+times in those several feet; but ever I endured the agony of
+resurrection and dragged Margaret with me. Sometimes the full strength
+I could exert did not move her, and I lay with her and coughed and
+strangled my way through to another resurrection.
+
+And the door was open. The doors to starboard and to port were both
+open; and as the _Elsinore_ rolled a draught through the chart-house
+hall my lungs filled with pure, cool air. As I drew myself across the
+high threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I heard
+the cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver. And, ere I
+fainted into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone so beyond
+endurance that it had achieved its own anæsthesia, I glimpsed,
+dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail, dark forms
+that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-mast brightly
+lighted by our illuminators.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop. My five Asiatics and two
+white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay unconscious
+side by side.
+
+The whole affair was very simple. Modern maritime quarantine demands
+that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers.
+In the donkey-engine section of the for’ard house is a complete
+fumigating apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the
+pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of
+steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump.
+Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the strangling sulphur
+fumes. We in the high place had been smoked out by our rascals like so
+many rats.
+
+It was Wada who had opened one of the doors. The old steward had opened
+the other. Together they had attempted the descent of the stairway and
+been driven back by the fumes. Then they had engaged in the struggle to
+repel the rush from for’ard.
+
+Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves the
+lungs sore. Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we draw
+breath in anything that resembles comfort. But still my lungs were not
+so sore as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she meant to
+me. And yet she is only a woman—I tell her so; I tell her that there
+are at least seven hundred and fifty millions of two-legged,
+long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like her on the
+planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity of numbers of
+her sex and kind. But I tell her something more. I tell her that of all
+of them she is the only one. And, better yet, to myself and for myself,
+I believe it. I know it. The last least part of me and all of me
+proclaims it.
+
+Love _is_ wonderful. It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement.
+Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and
+calculating and classifying love. It is a profound foolishness, a
+cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher—yes,
+and of the futurist. But when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots
+and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover, then all he
+may do, and which is what he cannot help doing, is to yield to the
+compulsions of being and throw both his arms around love and hold it
+closer to him than is his own heart close to him. This is the summit of
+his life, and of man’s life. Higher than this no man may rise. The
+philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks far below. He who has
+not loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of living. I know. I love
+Margaret, a woman. She is desirable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L.
+
+
+In the past twenty-four hours many things have happened. To begin with,
+we nearly lost the steward in the second dog-watch last evening.
+Through the slits in the ventilator some man thrust a knife into the
+sacks of flour and cut them wide open from top to bottom. In the dark
+the flour poured to the deck unobserved.
+
+Of course, the man behind could not see through the screen of empty
+sacks, but he took a blind pot-shot at point-blank range when the
+steward went by, slip-sloppily dragging the heels of his slippers.
+Fortunately it was a miss, but so close a miss was it that his cheek
+and neck were burned with powder grains.
+
+At six bells in the first watch came another surprise. Tom Spink came
+to me where I stood guard at the for’ard end of the poop. His voice
+shook as he spoke.
+
+“For the love of God, sir, they’ve come,” he said.
+
+“Who?” I asked sharply.
+
+“Them,” he chattered. “The ones that come aboard off the Horn, sir, the
+three drownded sailors. They’re there, aft, sir, the three of ’em,
+standin’ in a row by the wheel.”
+
+“How did they get there?”
+
+“Bein’ warlocks, they flew, sir. You didn’t see ’m go by you, did you,
+sir?”
+
+“No,” I admitted. “They never went by me.”
+
+Poor Tom Spink groaned.
+
+“But there are lines aloft there on which they could cross over from
+mizzen to jigger,” I added. “Send Wada to me.”
+
+When the latter relieved me I went aft. And there in a row were our
+three pale-haired storm-waifs with the topaz eyes. In the light of a
+bull’s-eye, held on them by Louis, their eyes never seemed more like
+the eyes of great cats. And, heavens, they purred! At least, the
+inarticulate noises they made sounded more like purring than anything
+else. That these sounds meant friendliness was very evident. Also, they
+held out their hands, palms upward, in unmistakable sign of peace. Each
+in turn doffed his cap and placed my hand for a moment on his head.
+Without doubt this meant their offer of fealty, their acceptance of me
+as master.
+
+I nodded my head. There was nothing to be said to men who purred like
+cats, while sign-language in the light of the bull’s-eye was rather
+difficult. Tom Spink groaned protest when I told Louis to take them
+below and give them blankets.
+
+I made the sleep-sign to them, and they nodded gratefully, hesitated,
+then pointed to their mouths and rubbed their stomachs.
+
+“Drowned men do not eat,” I laughed to Tom Spink. “Go down and watch
+them. Feed them up, Louis, all they want. It’s a good sign of short
+rations for’ard.”
+
+At the end of half an hour Tom Spink was back.
+
+“Well, did they eat?” I challenged him.
+
+But he was unconvinced. The very quantity they had eaten was a
+suspicious thing, and, further, he had heard of a kind of ghost that
+devoured dead bodies in graveyards. Therefore, he concluded, mere
+non-eating was no test for a ghost.
+
+The third event of moment occurred this morning at seven o’clock. The
+mutineers called for a truce; and when Nosey Murphy, the Maltese
+Cockney, and the inevitable Charles Davis stood beneath me on the main
+deck, their faces showed lean and drawn. Famine had been my great ally.
+And in truth, with Margaret beside me in that high place of the break
+of the poop, as I looked down on the hungry wretches I felt very
+strong. Never had the inequality of numbers fore and aft been less than
+now. The three deserters, added to our own nine, made twelve of us,
+while the mutineers, after subtracting Ditman Olansen, Bob and the
+Faun, totalled only an even score. And of these Bert Rhine must
+certainly be in a bad way, while there were many weaklings, such as
+Sundry Buyers, Nancy, Larry, and Lars Jacobsen.
+
+“Well, what do you want?” I demanded. “I haven’t much time to waste.
+Breakfast is ready and waiting.”
+
+Charles Davis started to speak, but I shut him off.
+
+“I’ll have nothing out of you, Davis. At least not now. Later on, when
+I’m in that court of law you’ve bothered me with for half the voyage,
+you’ll get your turn at talking. And when that time comes don’t forget
+that I shall have a few words to say.”
+
+Again he began, but this time was stopped by Nosey Murphy.
+
+“Aw, shut your trap, Davis,” the gangster snarled, “or I’ll shut it for
+you.” He glanced up to me. “We want to go back to work, that’s what we
+want.”
+
+“Which is not the way to ask for it,” I answered.
+
+“Sir,” he added hastily.
+
+“That’s better,” I commented.
+
+“Oh, my God, sir, don’t let ’m come aft.” Tom Spink muttered hurriedly
+in my ear. “That’d be the end of all of us. And even if they didn’t get
+you an’ the rest, they’d heave me over some dark night. They ain’t
+never goin’ to forgive me, sir, for joinin’ in with the afterguard.”
+
+I ignored the interruption and addressed the gangster.
+
+“There’s nothing like going to work when you want to as badly as you
+seem to. Suppose all hands get sail on her just to show good
+intention.”
+
+“We’d like to eat first, sir,” he objected.
+
+“I’d like to see you setting sail, first,” was my reply. “And you may
+as well get it from me straight that what I like goes, aboard this
+ship.”—I almost said “hooker.”
+
+Nosey Murphy hesitated and looked to the Maltese Cockney for counsel.
+The latter debated, as if gauging the measure of his weakness while he
+stared aloft at the work involved. Finally he nodded.
+
+“All right, sir,” the gangster spoke up. “We’ll do it . . . but can’t
+something be cookin’ in the galley while we’re doin’ it?”
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“I didn’t have that in mind, and I don’t care to change my mind now.
+When every sail is stretched and every yard braced, and all that mess
+of gear cleared up, food for a good meal will be served out. You
+needn’t bother about the spanker nor the mizzen-braces. We’ll make your
+work lighter by that much.”
+
+In truth, as they climbed aloft they showed how miserably weak they
+were. There were some too feeble to go aloft. Poor Sundry Buyers
+continually pressed his abdomen as he toiled around the deck-capstans;
+and never was Nancy’s face quite so forlorn as when he obeyed the
+Maltese Cockney’s command and went up to loose the mizzen-skysail.
+
+In passing, I must note one delicious miracle that was worked before
+our eyes. They were hoisting the mizzen-upper-topsail-yard by means of
+one of the patent deck-capstans. Although they had reversed the gear so
+as to double the purchase, they were having a hard time of it. Lars
+Jacobsen was limping on his twice-broken leg, and with him were Sundry
+Buyers, Tony the Greek, Bombini, and Mulligan Jacobs. Nosey Murphy held
+the turn.
+
+When they stopped from sheer exhaustion Murphy’s glance chanced to fall
+on Charles Davis, the one man who had not worked since the outset of
+the voyage and who was not working now.
+
+“Bear a hand, Davis,” the gangster called.
+
+Margaret gurgled low laughter in my ear as she caught the drift of the
+episode.
+
+The sea-lawyer looked at the other in amazement ere he answered:
+
+“I guess not.”
+
+After nodding Sundry Buyers over to him to take the turn Murphy
+straightened his back and walked close to Davis, then said very
+quietly:
+
+“I guess yes.”
+
+That was all. For a space neither spoke. Davis seemed to be giving the
+matter judicial consideration. The men at the capstan panted, rested,
+and looked on—all save Bombini, who slunk across the deck until he
+stood at Murphy’s shoulder.
+
+Under such circumstances the decision Charles Davis gave was eminently
+the right one, although even then he offered a compromise.
+
+“I’ll hold the turn,” he volunteered.
+
+“You’ll lump around one of them capstan-bars,” Murphy said.
+
+The sea-lawyer made no mistake. He knew in all absoluteness that he was
+choosing between life and death, and he limped over to the capstan and
+found his place. And as the work started, and as he toiled around and
+around the narrow circle, Margaret and I shamelessly and loudly laughed
+our approval. And our own men stole for’ard along the poop to peer down
+at the spectacle of Charles Davis at work.
+
+All of which must have pleased Nosey Murphy, for, as he continued to
+hold the turn and coil down, he kept a critical eye on Davis.
+
+“More juice, Davis!” he commanded with abrupt sharpness.
+
+And Davis, with a startle, visibly increased his efforts.
+
+This was too much for our fellows, who, Asiatics and all, applauded
+with laughter and hand-clapping. And what could I do? It was a gala
+day, and our faithful ones deserved some little recompense of
+amusement. So I ignored the breach of discipline and of poop etiquette
+by strolling away aft with Margaret.
+
+At the wheel was one of our storm-waifs. I set the course due east for
+Valparaiso, and sent the steward below to bring up sufficient food for
+one substantial meal for the mutineers.
+
+“When do we get our next grub, sir?” Nosey Murphy asked, as the steward
+served the supplies down to him from the poop.
+
+“At midday,” I answered. “And as long as you and your gang are good,
+you’ll get your grub three times each day. You can choose your own
+watches any way you please. But the ship’s work must be done, and done
+properly. If it isn’t, then the grub stops. That will do. Now go
+for’ard.”
+
+“One thing more, sir,” he said quickly. “Bert Rhine is awful bad. He
+can’t see, sir. It looks like he’s going to lose his face. He can’t
+sleep. He groans all the time.”
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+It was a busy day. I made a selection of things from the medicine-chest
+for the acid-burned gangster; and, finding that Murphy knew how to
+manipulate a hypodermic syringe, entrusted him with one.
+
+Then, too, I practised with the sextant and think I fairly caught the
+sun at noon and correctly worked up the observation. But this is
+latitude, and is comparatively easy. Longitude is more difficult. But I
+am reading up on it.
+
+All afternoon a gentle northerly fan of air snored the _Elsinore_
+through the water at a five-knot clip, and our course lay east for
+land, for the habitations of men, for the law and order that men
+institute whenever they organize into groups. Once in Valparaiso, with
+police flag flying, our mutineers will be taken care of by the shore
+authorities.
+
+Another thing I did was to rearrange our watches aft so as to split up
+the three storm-visitors. Margaret took one in her watch, along with
+the two sail-makers, Tom Spink, and Louis. Louis is half white, and all
+trustworthy, so that, at all times, on deck or below, he is told off to
+the task of never letting the topaz-eyed one out of his sight.
+
+In my watch are the steward, Buckwheat, Wada, and the other two
+topaz-eyed ones. And to one of them Wada is told off; and to the other
+is assigned the steward. We are not taking any chances. Always, night
+and day, on duty or off, these storm-strangers will have one of our
+proved men watching them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+Yes; and I tried the stranger men out last evening. It was after a
+council with Margaret. She was sure, and I agreed with her, that the
+men for’ard are not blindly yielding to our bringing them in to be
+prisoners in Valparaiso. As we tried to forecast it, their plan is to
+desert the _Elsinore_ in the boats as soon as we fetch up with the
+land. Also, considering some of the bitter lunatic spirits for’ard,
+there would be a large chance of their drilling the _Elsinore’s_ steel
+sides and scuttling her ere they took to the boats. For scuttling a
+ship is surely as ancient a practice as mutiny on the high seas.
+
+So it was, at one in the morning, that I tried out our strangers. Two
+of them I took for’ard with me in the raid on the small boats. One I
+left beside Margaret, who kept charge of the poop. On the other side of
+him stood the steward with his big hacking knife. By signs I had made
+it clear to him, and to his two comrades who were to accompany me
+for’ard, that at the first sign of treachery he would be killed. And
+not only did the old steward, with signs emphatic and unmistakable,
+pledge himself to perform the execution, but we were all convinced that
+he was eager for the task.
+
+With Margaret I also left Buckwheat and Tom Spink. Wada, the two
+sail-makers, Louis, and the two topaz-eyed ones accompanied me. In
+addition to fighting weapons we were armed with axes. We crossed the
+main deck unobserved, gained the bridge by way of the ’midship-house,
+and by way of the bridge gained the top of the for’ard-house. Here were
+the first boats we began work on; but, first of all, I called in the
+lookout from the forecastle-head.
+
+He was Mulligan Jacobs; and he picked his way back across the wreck of
+the bridge where the fore-topgallant-yard still lay, and came up to me
+unafraid, as implacable and bitter as ever.
+
+“Jacobs,” I whispered, “you are to stay here beside me until we finish
+the job of smashing the boats. Do you get that?”
+
+“As though it could fright me,” he growled all too loudly. “Go ahead
+for all I care. I know your game. And I know the game of the hell’s
+maggots under our feet this minute. ’Tis they that’d desert in the
+boats. ’Tis you that’ll smash the boats an’ jail ’m kit an’ crew.”
+
+“S-s-s-h,” I vainly interpolated.
+
+“What of it?” he went on as loudly as ever. “They’re sleepin’ with full
+bellies. The only night watch we keep is the lookout. Even Rhine’s
+asleep. A few jolts of the needle has put a clapper to his eternal
+moanin’. Go on with your work. Smash the boats. ’Tis nothin’ I care.
+’Tis well I know my own crooked back is worth more to me than the necks
+of the scum of the world below there.”
+
+“If you felt that way, why didn’t you join us?” I queried.
+
+“Because I like you no better than them an’ not half so well. They are
+what you an’ your fathers have made ’em. An’ who in hell are you an’
+your fathers? Robbers of the toil of men. I like them little. I like
+you and your fathers not at all. Only I like myself and me crooked back
+that’s a livin’ proof there ain’t no God and makes Browning a liar.”
+
+“Join us now,” I urged, meeting him in his mood. “It will be easier for
+your back.”
+
+“To hell with you,” was his answer. “Go ahead an’ smash the boats. You
+can hang some of them. But you can’t touch me with the law. ’Tis me
+that’s a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand
+against any man—a feather blown about by the windy contention of men
+strong in their back an’ brainless in their heads.”
+
+“As you please,” I said.
+
+“As I can’t help pleasin’,” he retorted, “bein’ what I am an’ so made
+for the little flash between the darknesses which men call life. Now
+why couldn’t I a-ben a butterfly, or a fat pig in a full trough, or a
+mere mortal man with a straight back an’ women to love me? Go on an’
+smash the boats. Play hell to the top of your bent. Like me, you’ll end
+in the darkness. And your darkness’ll be—as dark as mine.”
+
+“A full belly puts the spunk back into you,” I sneered.
+
+“’Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid. Go
+on an’ smash the boats.”
+
+“Whose idea was the sulphur?” I asked.
+
+“I’m not tellin’ you the man, but I envied him until it showed failure.
+An’ whose idea was it—to douse the sulphuric into Rhine’s face? He’ll
+lose that same face, from the way it’s shedding.”
+
+“Nor will I tell you,” I said. “Though I will tell you that I am glad
+the idea was not mine.”
+
+“Oh, well,” he muttered cryptically, “different customs on different
+ships, as the cook said when he went for’ard to cast off the spanker
+sheet.”
+
+Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time
+to work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea.
+Mulligan Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he
+not been born crooked with a crooked back.
+
+And we smashed the boats. With axes and sledges it was an easier task
+than I had imagined. On top of both houses we left the boats masses of
+splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most energetically;
+and we regained the poop without a shot being fired. The forecastle
+turned out, of course, at our noise, but made no attempt to interfere
+with us.
+
+And right here I register another complaint against the sea-novelists.
+A score of men for’ard, desperate all, with desperate deeds behind
+them, and jail and the gallows facing them not many days away, should
+have only begun to fight. And yet this score of men did nothing while
+we destroyed their last chance for escape.
+
+“But where did they get the grub?” the steward asked me afterwards.
+
+This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr. Pike
+began cudgelling his brains over it. I wonder, had I asked Mulligan
+Jacobs the question, if he would have told me? At any rate, in court at
+Valparaiso that question will be answered. In the meantime I suppose I
+shall submit to having the steward ask me it daily.
+
+“It is murder and mutiny on the high seas,” I told them this morning,
+when they came aft in a body to complain about the destruction of the
+boats and to demand my intentions.
+
+And as I looked down upon the poor wretches from the break of the poop,
+standing there in the high place, the vision of my kind down all its
+mad, violent, and masterful past was strong upon me. Already, since our
+departure from Baltimore, three other men, masters, had occupied this
+high place and gone their way—the Samurai, Mr. Pike, and Mr. Mellaire.
+I stood here, fourth, no seaman, merely a master by the blood of my
+ancestors; and the work of the _Elsinore_ in the world went on.
+
+Bert Rhine, his head and face swathed in bandages, stood there beneath
+me, and I felt for him a tingle of respect. He, too, in a subterranean,
+ghetto way was master over his rats. Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist stood
+shoulder to shoulder with their stricken gangster leader. It was his
+will, because of his terrible injury, to get in to land and doctors as
+quickly as possible. He preferred taking his chance in court against
+the chance of losing his life, or, perhaps, his eyesight.
+
+The crew was divided against itself; and Isaac Chantz, the Jew, his
+wounded shoulder with a hunch to it, seemed to lead the revolt against
+the gangsters. His wound was enough to convict him in any court, and
+well he knew it. Beside him, and at his shoulders, clustered the
+Maltese Cockney, Andy Fay, Arthur Deacon, Frank Fitzgibbon, Richard
+Giller, and John Hackey.
+
+In another group, still allegiant to the gangsters, were men such as
+Shorty, Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, and Larry. Charles Davis was
+prominently in the gangster group. A fourth group was composed of
+Sundry Buyers, Nancy, and Tony the Greek. This group was distinctly
+neutral. And, finally, unaffiliated, quite by himself, stood Mulligan
+Jacobs—listening, I fancy, to far echoes of ancient wrongs, and
+feeling, I doubt not, the bite of the iron-hot hooks in his brain.
+
+“What are you going to do with us, sir?” Isaac Chantz demanded of me,
+in defiance to the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.
+
+Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew’s voice.
+Chantz’s partisans drew closer to him.
+
+“Jail you,” I answered from above. “And it shall go as hard with all of
+you as I can make it hard.”
+
+“Maybe you will an’ maybe you won’t,” the Jew retorted.
+
+“Shut up, Chantz!” Bert Rhine commanded.
+
+“And you’ll get yours, you wop,” Chantz snarled, “if I have to do it
+myself.”
+
+I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have
+been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in
+observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to
+glimpse the tragedy into which it was culminating.
+
+“Bombini!” Bert Rhine said.
+
+His voice was imperative. It was the order of a master to the dog at
+heel. Bombini responded. He drew his knife and started to advance upon
+the Jew. But a deep rumbling, animal-like in its _sound_ and menace,
+arose in the throats of those about the Jew.
+
+Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader,
+whose face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not see.
+
+“’Tis a good deed—do it, Bombini,” Charles Davis encouraged.
+
+“Shut your face, Davis!” came out from Bert Rhine’s bandages.
+
+Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into Bombini’s
+side, then covered the men about the Jew.
+
+Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian. He was
+caught between the mill-stones, “Bombini, stick that Jew,” Bert Rhine
+commanded.
+
+The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either side,
+Kid Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.
+
+“I cannot see him,” Bert Rhine went on; “but by God I will see him!”
+
+And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the
+bandages. The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement. I
+saw the horror of his face, but the description of it is beyond the
+limits of any English I possess. I was aware that Margaret, at my
+shoulder, gasped and shuddered.
+
+“Bombini!—stick him,” the gangster repeated. “And stick any man that
+raises a yap. Murphy! See that Bombini does his work.”
+
+Murphy’s knife was out and at the bravo’s back. Kid Twist covered the
+Jew’s group with his revolver. And the three advanced.
+
+It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed
+from dream to action.
+
+“Bombini!” I said sharply.
+
+He paused and looked up.
+
+“Stand where you are,” I ordered, “till I do some talking.—Chantz! Make
+no mistake. Rhine is boss for’ard. You take his orders . . . until we
+get into Valparaiso; then you’ll take your chances along with him in
+jail. In the meantime, what Rhine says goes. Get that, and get it
+straight. I am behind Rhine until the police come on board.—Bombini! do
+whatever Rhine tells you. I’ll shoot the man who tries to stop
+you.—Deacon! Stand away from Chantz. Go over to the fife-rail.”
+
+All hands knew the stream of lead my automatic rifle could throw, and
+Arthur Deacon knew it. He hesitated barely a moment, then obeyed.
+
+“Fitzgibbon!—Giller!—Hackey!” I called in turn, and was obeyed. “Fay!”
+I called twice, ere the response came.
+
+Isaac Chantz stood alone, and Bombini now showed eagerness.
+
+“Chantz!” I said; “don’t you think it would be healthier to go over to
+the fife-rail and be good?”
+
+He debated the matter not many seconds, resheathed his knife, and
+complied.
+
+The tang of power! I was minded to let literature get the better of me
+and read the rascals a lecture; but thank heaven I had sufficient
+proportion and balance to refrain.
+
+“Rhine!” I said.
+
+He turned his corroded face up to me and blinked in an effort to see.
+
+“As long as Chantz takes your orders, leave him alone. We’ll need every
+hand to work the ship in. As for yourself, send Murphy aft in half an
+hour and I’ll give him the best the medicine-chest affords. That is
+all. Go for’ard.”
+
+And they shambled away, beaten and dispirited.
+
+“But that man—his face—what happened to him?” Margaret asked of me.
+
+Sad it is to end love with lies. Sadder still is it to begin love with
+lies. I had tried to hide this one happening from Margaret, and I had
+failed. It could no longer be hidden save by lying; and so I told her
+the truth, told her how and why the gangster had had his face dashed
+with sulphuric acid by the old steward who knew white men and their
+ways.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+There is little more to write. The mutiny of the _Elsinore_ is over.
+The divided crew is ruled by the gangsters, who are as intent on
+getting their leader into port as I am intent on getting all of them
+into jail. The first lap of the voyage of the _Elsinore_ draws to a
+close. Two days, at most, with our present sailing, will bring us into
+Valparaiso. And then, as beginning a new voyage, the _Elsinore_ will
+depart for Seattle.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+One thing more remains for me to write, and then this strange log of a
+strange cruise will be complete. It happened only last night. I am yet
+fresh from it, and athrill with it and with the promise of it.
+
+Margaret and I spent the last hour of the second dog-watch together at
+the break of the poop. It was good again to feel the _Elsinore_
+yielding to the wind-pressure on her canvas, to feel her again slipping
+and sliding through the water in an easy sea.
+
+Hidden by the darkness, clasped in each other’s arms, we talked love
+and love plans. Nor am I shamed to confess that I was all for
+immediacy. Once in Valparaiso, I contended, we would fit out the
+_Elsinore_ with fresh crew and officers and send her on her way. As for
+us, steamers and rapid travelling would fetch us quickly home.
+Furthermore, Valparaiso being a place where such things as licences and
+ministers obtained, we would be married ere we caught the fast steamers
+for home.
+
+But Margaret was obdurate. The Wests had always stood by their ships,
+she urged; had always brought their ships in to the ports intended or
+had gone down with their ships in the effort. The _Elsinore_ had
+cleared from Baltimore for Seattle with the Wests in the high place.
+The _Elsinore_ would re-equip with officers and men in Valparaiso, and
+the _Elsinore_ would arrive in Seattle with a West still on board.
+
+“But think, dear heart,” I objected. “The voyage will require months.
+Remember what Henley has said: ‘Every kiss we take or give leaves us
+less of life to live.’”
+
+She pressed her lips to mine.
+
+“We kiss,” she said.
+
+But I was stupid.
+
+* * * * *
+
+
+“Oh, the weary, weary months,” I complained. “You dear silly,” she
+gurgled. “Don’t you understand?”
+
+“I understand only that it is many a thousand miles from Valparaiso to
+Seattle,” I answered.
+
+“You won’t understand,” she challenged.
+
+“I am a fool,” I admitted. “I am aware of only one thing: I want you. I
+want you.”
+
+“You are a dear, but you are very, very stupid,” she said, and as she
+spoke she caught my hand and pressed the palm of it against her cheek.
+“What do you feel?” she asked.
+
+“Hot cheeks—cheeks most hot.”
+
+“I am blushing for what your stupidity compels me to say,” she
+explained. “You have already said that such things as licences and
+ministers obtain in Valparaiso . . . and . . . and, well . . . ”
+
+“You mean . . . ?” I stammered.
+
+“Just that,” she confirmed.
+
+“The honeymoon shall be on the _Elsinore_ from Valparaiso all the way
+to Seattle?” I rattled on.
+
+“The many thousands of miles, the weary, weary months,” she teased in
+my own intonations, until I stifled her teasing with my lips.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE ***
+
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mutiny of the Elsinore, by Jack London</title>
+
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mutiny of the Elsinore, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Mutiny of the Elsinore</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: December, 2000 [eBook #2415]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price and Rab Hughes</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE ***</div>
+
+<h1>The Mutiny of the Elsinore</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">
+by<br />
+JACK LONDON</h2>
+
+<p class="center">
+MILLS &amp; BOON, LIMITED<br />
+49 RUPERT STREET<br />
+LONDON, W.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Published 1915</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Copyright in the United States of America by</i> Jack London
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER XX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER XXI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER XXII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER XXIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER XXIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER XXV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap26">CHAPTER XXVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap27">CHAPTER XXVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap28">CHAPTER XXVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap29">CHAPTER XXIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap30">CHAPTER XXX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap31">CHAPTER XXXI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap32">CHAPTER XXXII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap33">CHAPTER XXXIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap34">CHAPTER XXXIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap35">CHAPTER XXXV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap36">CHAPTER XXXVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap37">CHAPTER XXXVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap38">CHAPTER XXXVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap39">CHAPTER XXXIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap40">CHAPTER XL.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap41">CHAPTER XLI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap42">CHAPTER XLII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap43">CHAPTER XLIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap44">CHAPTER XLIV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap45">CHAPTER XLV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap46">CHAPTER XLVI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap47">CHAPTER XLVII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap48">CHAPTER XLVIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap49">CHAPTER XLIX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap50">CHAPTER L.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<p>
+From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a bitter
+March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end precisely on
+time. At nine o&rsquo;clock the tug was to have taken me down the bay and put
+me on board the <i>Elsinore</i>, and with growing irritation I sat frozen
+inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside, the driver and Wada sat
+hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than mine. And there was
+no tug.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted upon me,
+whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under the fur robe.
+But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered and clawed and struggled
+to get out. And, once out and bitten by the cold, with equal insistence he
+whimpered and clawed to get back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled
+nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He meant nothing to
+me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily waited, I was on the
+verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two little girls&mdash;evidently
+the wharfinger&rsquo;s daughters&mdash;went by, my hand reached out to the door
+to open it so that I might call to them and present them with the puling little
+wretch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel the
+night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith&rsquo;s way. Yet he
+might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit . . . or
+flowers, even. But no; his affectionate inspiration had to take the form of a
+yelping, yapping two months&rsquo; old puppy. And with the advent of the
+terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the
+act I had not even had time to meditate. And then Wada, on his own initiative
+and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into
+his room and been caught by a house detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all
+his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and the house detective
+remembered only his Irish; while the hotel clerk had given me to understand in
+no uncertain terms that it was only what he had expected of me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in the cab on
+that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak that had
+started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By ten o&rsquo;clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-case,
+which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the wharfinger. It belonged
+to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to the chauffeur how to find some
+other pier from which, at some indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the
+<i>Elsinore</i> by some other tug. This served to increase my irritation. Why
+should I not have been informed as well as the pilot?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the new pier,
+the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could not have imagined. Here
+was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the sea, but a soft-spoken
+gentleman, for all the world the type of successful business man one meets in
+all the clubs. He introduced himself immediately, and I invited him to share my
+freezing cab with Possum and the baggage. That some change had been made in the
+arrangements by Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug would
+come along any time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait and
+freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made up my mind that I
+was not going to like this Captain West. Although I had never met him, his
+treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the least, cavalier. When the
+<i>Elsinore</i> lay in Erie Basin, just arrived from California with a cargo of
+barley, I had crossed over from New York to inspect what was to be my home for
+many months. I had been delighted with the ship and the cabin accommodation.
+Even the stateroom selected for me was satisfactory and far more spacious than
+I had expected. But when I peeped into the captain&rsquo;s room I was amazed at
+its comfort. When I say that it opened directly into a bath-room, and that,
+among other things, it was furnished with a big brass bed such as one would
+never suspect to find at sea, I have said enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed should be
+mine. When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain they seemed
+non-committal and uncomfortable. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know in the least what it
+is worth,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;And I don&rsquo;t care. Whether it costs one
+hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have those quarters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and scarcely
+thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement. &ldquo;Then he is
+the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I asserted
+confidently. &ldquo;Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners regularly sell
+their quarters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner,&rdquo; Mr.
+Harrison observed gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month,&rdquo; I retorted.
+&ldquo;Why, heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll try,&rdquo; said Mr. Gray, &ldquo;but we warn you not to
+place too much dependence on our efforts. Captain West is in Searsport at the
+present time, and we will write him to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform me that
+Captain West had declined my offer. &ldquo;Did you offer him up to a
+thousand?&rdquo; I demanded. &ldquo;What did he say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked,&rdquo; Mr.
+Gray replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A day later I received a letter from Captain West. The writing and the wording
+were old-fashioned and formal. He regretted not having yet met me, and assured
+me that he would see personally that my quarters were made comfortable. For
+that matter he had already dispatched orders to Mr. Pike, the first mate of the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, to knock out the partition between my state-room and the spare
+state-room adjoining. Further&mdash;and here is where my dislike for Captain
+West began&mdash;he informed me that if, when once well at sea, I should find
+myself dissatisfied, he would gladly, in that case, exchange quarters with me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could ever persuade
+me to occupy Captain West&rsquo;s brass bed. And it was this Captain Nathaniel
+West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me freezing on pier-ends through
+four miserable hours. The less I saw of him on the voyage the better, was my
+decision; and it was with a little tickle of pleasure that I thought of the
+many boxes of books I had dispatched on board from New York. Thank the Lord, I
+did not depend on sea captains for entertainment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and while the
+tug&rsquo;s sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by the pilot to
+an introduction with Captain West. At the first glimpse I knew that he was no
+more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot. I had seen the best of the
+breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more resembled them than did he
+resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced skippers I had read about in books. By
+his side stood a woman, of whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and
+gorgeous blob of colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was
+well-nigh buried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My God!&mdash;his wife!&rdquo; I darted in a whisper at the pilot.
+&ldquo;Going along with him? . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage, that the
+one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the <i>Elsinore</i>
+taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had smiled and assured me that
+Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s his daughter,&rdquo; the pilot replied under his breath.
+&ldquo;Come to see him off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say
+that is what sent him back to sea. He&rsquo;d retired, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched,
+before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I
+got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long, lean, in his face a
+touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as
+poised as a king or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral
+as a proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle
+of&mdash;oh&mdash;such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny
+wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by
+an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the
+thin lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt&rsquo;s
+when she moulds sound into speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that I was
+aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of untold
+beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most commonplace regrets at the delay in
+a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me. It was low and gentle, almost too
+low, yet clear as a bell and touched with a faint reminiscent twang of old New
+England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay,&rdquo; he
+concluded my introduction to his daughter. &ldquo;Margaret, this is Mr.
+Pathurst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and I found
+myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and gravely upon me. It
+was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching gaze. It was not that it
+was challenging, but that it was so insolently business-like. It was much in
+the very way one would look at a new coachman he was about to engage. I did not
+know then that she was to go on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the
+man who was to be a fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only
+natural. Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes
+smiled as she spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we moved on to enter the tug&rsquo;s cabin I heard Possum&rsquo;s shivering
+whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the creature
+in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my luggage, wedging my
+dressing-case securely upright by means of my little automatic rifle. I was
+startled by the mountain of luggage around which mine was no more than a
+fringe. Ship&rsquo;s stores, was my first thought, until I noted the number of
+trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and bundles of all sorts. The initials
+on what looked suspiciously like a woman&rsquo;s hat trunk caught my
+eye&mdash;&ldquo;M.W.&rdquo; Yet Captain West&rsquo;s first name was Nathaniel.
+On closer investigation I did find several &ldquo;N.W&rsquo;s.&rdquo; but
+everywhere I could see &ldquo;M.W&rsquo;s.&rdquo; Then I remembered that he had
+called her Margaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold deck
+biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly stipulated with the agents
+that no captain&rsquo;s wife was to come along. The last thing under the sun I
+desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman. But I had never thought
+about a captain&rsquo;s daughter. For two cents I was ready to throw the voyage
+over and return on the tug to Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I noticed
+Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid being struck by the
+spring and vitality of her walk. Her face, despite its firm moulding, had a
+suggestion of fragility that was belied by the robustness of her body. At
+least, one would argue that her body must be robust from her fashion of
+movement of it, though little could one divine the lines of it under the
+shapelessness of the furs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the mountain of
+luggage. A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and I was staring at it
+when she spoke at my shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what really caused the delay,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; I asked incuriously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> piano, all renovated. When I made up my
+mind to come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike&mdash;he&rsquo;s the mate, you know. He
+did his best. It was the fault of the piano house. And while we waited to-day I
+gave them a piece of my mind they&rsquo;ll not forget in a hurry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into the
+luggage as if in search of some particular piece. Having satisfied herself, she
+was starting back, when she paused and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you come into the cabin where it&rsquo;s warm? We
+won&rsquo;t be there for half an hour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did you decide to make this voyage?&rdquo; I demanded abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment caught all
+my disgruntlement and disgust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two days ago,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could speak she
+went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;re not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst. I
+probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we&rsquo;re all going
+to be comfortable and happy. You can&rsquo;t bother me, and I promise you I
+won&rsquo;t bother you. I&rsquo;ve sailed with passengers before, and
+I&rsquo;ve learned to put up with more than they ever proved they were able to
+put up with. So there. Let us start right, and it won&rsquo;t be any trouble to
+keep on going right. I know what is the matter with you. You think you&rsquo;ll
+be called upon to entertain me. Please know that I do not need entertainment. I
+never saw the longest voyage that was too long, and I always arrive at the end
+with too many things not done for the passage ever to have been tedious, and .
+. . I don&rsquo;t play <i>Chopsticks</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Elsinore</i>, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when we
+came alongside. I knew too little about ships to be capable of admiring her
+lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration. I was still debating with
+myself whether or not to chuck the whole thing and return on the tug. From all
+of which it must not be taken that I am a vacillating type of man. On the
+contrary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I been keen
+for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was because there was
+nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life had lost its savour. I was
+not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But the zest had gone out of things. I had
+lost taste for my fellow-men and all their foolish, little, serious endeavours.
+For a far longer period I had been dissatisfied with women. I had endured them,
+but I had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their
+almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them. And
+I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of art&mdash;a
+pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not only its
+devotees but its practitioners.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, I was embarking on the <i>Elsinore</i> because it was easier to than
+not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy. That was the curse
+of the condition into which I had fallen. That was why, as I stepped upon the
+deck of the <i>Elsinore</i>, I was half of a mind to tell them to keep my
+luggage where it was and bid Captain West and his daughter good-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile Miss West
+gave me as she started directly across the deck for the cabin, and the
+knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie Basin.
+He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be painful, but did not
+offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call orders to half-a-dozen
+frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled up from somewhere in the waist
+of the ship. Mr. Pike had been drinking. That was patent. His face was puffed
+and discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and chiding
+my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few words that would
+put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who were now carrying the luggage
+aft into the cabin, they were unlike any concept I had ever entertained of
+sailors. Certainly, on the liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of
+remarkable Italian eyes. But he was a dwarf. So short was he that he was all
+sea-boots and sou&rsquo;wester. And yet he was not entirely Italian. So certain
+was I that I asked the mate, who answered morosely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Him? Shorty? He&rsquo;s a dago half-breed. The other half&rsquo;s Jap or
+Malay.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought he had
+been recently injured. His face was stolid and ox-like, and as he shuffled and
+dragged his brogans over the deck he paused every several steps to place both
+hands on his abdomen and execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement. Months
+were to pass, in which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that
+there was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a habit.
+His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it was unthinkably and
+abysmally stupider. And his name, as I was to learn, of all names was Sundry
+Buyers. And he was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship
+<i>Elsinore</i>&mdash;rated one of the finest sailing-ships afloat!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw only one,
+called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the slightest what I had
+conceived all sailors to be like. He had come off a training ship, the mate
+told me, and this was his first voyage to sea. His face was keen-cut, alert, as
+were his bodily movements, and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with
+sailor-seeming grace. In fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only
+sailor-seeming creature fore and aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any moment, the mate
+vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy. Those already on board were the
+miscellaneous ones who had shipped themselves in New York without the mediation
+of boarding-house masters. And what the crew itself would be like God alone
+could tell&mdash;so said the mate. Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian
+half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come out of
+steam and this was his first sailing voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ordinary seamen!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question.
+&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t carry Landsmen!&mdash;forget it! Every clodhopper
+an&rsquo; cow-walloper these days is an able seaman. That&rsquo;s the way they
+rank and are paid. The merchant service is all shot to hell. There ain&rsquo;t
+no more sailors. They all died years ago, before you were born even.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate&rsquo;s breath. Yet he did not
+stagger nor show any signs of intoxication. Not until afterward was I to know
+that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was where the liquor gave
+him away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;d a-ben a grace had I died years ago,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;rather than to a-lived to see sailors an&rsquo; ships pass away from the
+sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I understand the <i>Elsinore</i> is considered one of the
+finest,&rdquo; I urged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So she is . . . to-day. But what is she?&mdash;a damned cargo-carrier.
+She ain&rsquo;t built for sailin&rsquo;, an&rsquo; if she was there ain&rsquo;t
+no sailors left to sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers! When I think of
+&rsquo;em!&mdash;<i>The Gamecock</i>, <i>Shootin&rsquo; Star</i>,
+<i>Flyin&rsquo; Fish</i>, <i>Witch o&rsquo; the Wave</i>, <i>Staghound</i>,
+<i>Harvey Birch</i>, <i>Canvas-back</i>, <i>Fleetwing</i>, <i>Sea Serpent</i>,
+<i>Northern Light</i>! An&rsquo; when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
+that used to load at Hong Kong an&rsquo; race the Eastern Passages. A fine
+sight! A fine sight!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to go into the
+cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I paced up and down the
+deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in all conscience, broad-shouldered,
+heavy-boned, and, despite the profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet
+in height.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a splendid figure of a man,&rdquo; I complimented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was, I was,&rdquo; he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of
+whiskey strong on the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three of mine.
+His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How much do you weigh?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two hundred an&rsquo; ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the
+scales close to two-forty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the <i>Elsinore</i> can&rsquo;t sail,&rdquo; I said, returning to
+the subject which had roused him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a
+month&rsquo;s wages, she won&rsquo;t make it around in a hundred an&rsquo;
+fifty days,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Yet I&rsquo;ve come round in the old
+<i>Flyin&rsquo; Cloud</i> in eighty-nine days&mdash;eighty-nine days, sir, from
+Sandy Hook to &rsquo;Frisco. Sixty men for&rsquo;ard that <i>was</i> men,
+an&rsquo; eight boys, an&rsquo; drive! drive! drive! Three hundred an&rsquo;
+seventy-four miles for a day&rsquo;s run under t&rsquo;gallantsails, an&rsquo;
+in the squalls eighteen knots o&rsquo; line not enough to time her. Eighty-nine
+days&mdash;never beat, an&rsquo; tied once by the old <i>Andrew Jackson</i>
+nine years afterwards. Them was the days!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did the <i>Andrew Jackson</i> tie her?&rdquo; I asked, because of
+the growing suspicion that he was &ldquo;having&rdquo; me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In 1860,&rdquo; was his prompt reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you sailed in the <i>Flying Cloud</i> nine years before that, and
+this is 1913&mdash;why, that was sixty-two years ago,&rdquo; I charged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I was seven years old,&rdquo; he chuckled. &ldquo;My mother was
+stewardess on the <i>Flyin&rsquo; Cloud</i>. I was born at sea. I was boy when
+I was twelve, on the <i>Herald o&rsquo; the Morn</i>, when she made around in
+ninety-nine days&mdash;half the crew in irons most o&rsquo; the time, five men
+lost from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square
+off, knuckle-dusters an&rsquo; belayin&rsquo;-pins flyin&rsquo;, three men shot
+by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an&rsquo; no one to
+know who done it, an&rsquo; drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land to
+land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an&rsquo; east to west around Cape
+Stiff!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that would make you sixty-nine years old,&rdquo; I insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which I am,&rdquo; he retorted proudly, &ldquo;an&rsquo; a better man at
+that than the scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of &rsquo;em would
+die under the things I&rsquo;ve been through. Did you ever hear of the <i>Sunny
+South</i>?&mdash;she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an&rsquo; changed
+her name to <i>Emanuela</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve sailed the Middle Passage!&rdquo; I cried, recollecting
+the old phrase.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was on the <i>Emanuela</i> that day in Mozambique Channel when the
+<i>Brisk</i> caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she
+wouldn&rsquo;t a-caught us except for her having steam.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the past, and to
+listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old man-killing and
+man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and yet, as I studied his
+shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge feet, I was convinced that his
+years were as he asserted. He spoke of a Captain Sonurs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was a great captain,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;An&rsquo; in the
+two years I sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn&rsquo;t jump the
+ship goin&rsquo; in an&rsquo; stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she
+sailed again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The men, on account of the men swearin&rsquo; blood an&rsquo; vengeance
+and warrants against me because of my ways of teachin&rsquo; them to be
+sailors. Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid for
+me&mdash;and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed knuckles I
+understood the nature of his work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But all that&rsquo;s stopped now,&rdquo; he lamented. &ldquo;A
+sailor&rsquo;s a gentleman these days. You can&rsquo;t raise your voice or your
+hand to them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the second mate, a
+medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The tug&rsquo;s in sight with the crew, sir,&rdquo; he announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, &ldquo;Come on down, Mr.
+Mellaire, and meet our passenger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire came down
+the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction. He was courteous in an
+old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and unmistakably from south of Mason and
+Dixon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A Southerner,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Georgia, sir.&rdquo; He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow
+and smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was the
+cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man&rsquo;s face. It was a gash. There is
+no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth that
+uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I glanced at his hands.
+Like the mate&rsquo;s, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed.
+Back into his blue eyes I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a
+gloss of gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided
+neither sincerity nor mercy. Behind that gloss was something cold and terrible,
+that lurked and waited and watched&mdash;something catlike, something inimical
+and deadly. Behind that gloss of soft light and of social sparkle was the live,
+fearful thing that had shaped that mouth into the gash it was. What I sensed
+behind in those eyes chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and exchanged
+amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest or jungle
+when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying upon him. Frankly
+I was afraid of the thing ambushed behind there in the skull of Mr. Mellaire.
+One so as a matter of course identifies form and feature with the spirit
+within. But I could not do this with the second mate. His face and form and
+manner and suave ease were one thing, inside which he, an entirely different
+thing, lay hid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask for
+instructions. I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside. Mr. Pike looked at
+me quickly and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and started
+for&rsquo;ard. I stood and waited for Mr. Pike&rsquo;s communication, which he
+did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out of ear-shot. Then
+he leaned closely to me and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t mention that little matter of my age to anybody. Each year I
+sign on I sign my age one year younger. I am fifty-four, now, on the
+articles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you don&rsquo;t look a day older,&rdquo; I answered lightly, though
+I meant it in all sincerity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I don&rsquo;t feel it. I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the
+younglings. And don&rsquo;t let my age get to anybody&rsquo;s ears, Mr.
+Pathurst. Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the seventy
+mark. And owners neither. I&rsquo;ve had my hopes for this ship, and I&rsquo;d
+a-got her, I think, except for the old man decidin&rsquo; to go to sea again.
+As if he needed the money! The old skinflint!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is he well off?&rdquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well off! If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken
+ranch in California and live like a fighting cock&mdash;yes, if I had a
+fiftieth of what he&rsquo;s got salted away. Why, he owns more stock in all the
+Blackwood ships . . . and they&rsquo;ve always been lucky and always earned
+money. I&rsquo;m getting old, and it&rsquo;s about time I got a command. But
+no; the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to sea again just as the
+berth&rsquo;s ripe for me to fall into.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pathurst? You won&rsquo;t mention about my age?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, certainly not, Mr. Pike,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Quite chilled through, I was immediately struck by the warm comfort of the
+cabin. All the connecting doors were open, making what I might call a large
+suite of rooms or a whale house. The main-deck entrance, on the port side, was
+into a wide, well-carpeted hallway. Into this hallway, from the port side,
+opened five rooms: first, on entering, the mate&rsquo;s; next, the two
+state-rooms which had been knocked into one for me; then the steward&rsquo;s
+room; and, adjoining his, completing the row, a state-room which was used for
+the slop-chest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Across the hall was a region with which I was not yet acquainted, though I knew
+it contained the dining-room, the bath-rooms, the cabin proper, which was in
+truth a spacious living-room, the captain&rsquo;s quarters, and, undoubtedly,
+Miss West&rsquo;s quarters. I could hear her humming some air as she bustled
+about with her unpacking. The steward&rsquo;s pantry, separated by crosshalls
+and by the stairway leading into the chart-room above on the poop, was placed
+strategically in the centre of all its operations. Thus, on the starboard side
+of it were the state-rooms of the captain and Miss West, for&rsquo;ard of it
+were the dining-room and main cabin; while on the port side of it was the row
+of rooms I have described, two of which were mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I ventured down the hall toward the stern, and found it opened into the stern
+of the <i>Elsinore</i>, forming a single large apartment at least thirty-five
+feet from side to side and fifteen to eighteen feet in depth, curved, of
+course, to the lines of the ship&rsquo;s stern. This seemed a store-room. I
+noted wash-tubs, bolts of canvas, many lockers, hams and bacon hanging, a
+step-ladder that led up through a small hatch to the poop, and, in the floor,
+another hatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spoke to the steward, an old Chinese, smooth-faced and brisk of movement,
+whose name I never learned, but whose age on the articles was fifty-six.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is down there?&rdquo; I asked, pointing to the hatch in the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Him lazarette,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And who eats there?&rdquo; I indicated a table with two stationary
+sea-chairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Him second table. Second mate and carpenter him eat that table.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I had finished giving instructions to Wada for the arranging of my things
+I looked at my watch. It was early yet, only several minutes after three so I
+went on deck again to witness the arrival of the crew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The actual coming on board from the tug I had missed, but for&rsquo;ard of the
+amidship house I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone into the
+forecastle. These were the worse for liquor, and a more wretched, miserable,
+disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum. Their clothes were rags.
+Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won&rsquo;t say they were
+villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of
+speech, and action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come! Come! Get your dunnage into the
+fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;le!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike uttered these words sharply from the bridge above. A light and
+graceful bridge of steel rods and planking ran the full length of the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, starting from the poop, crossing the amidship house and the
+forecastle, and connecting with the forecastle-head at the very bow of the
+ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the mate&rsquo;s command the men reeled about and glowered up at him, one or
+two starting clumsily to obey. The others ceased their drunken yammerings and
+regarded the mate sullenly. One of them, with a face mashed by some mad god in
+the making, and who was afterwards to be known by me as Larry, burst into a
+guffaw, and spat insolently on the deck. Then, with utmost deliberation, he
+turned to his fellows and demanded loudly and huskily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who in hell&rsquo;s the old stiff, anyways?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw Mr. Pike&rsquo;s huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and I
+noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the bridge-railing.
+Beyond that he controlled himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on, you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have nothing out of you.
+Get into the fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;le.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, to my surprise, he turned and walked aft along the bridge to where
+the tug was casting off its lines. So this was all his high and mighty talk of
+kill and drive, I thought. Not until afterwards did I recollect, as I turned
+aft down the deck, that I saw Captain West leaning on the rail at the break of
+the poop and gazing for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tug&rsquo;s lines were being cast off, and I was interested in watching the
+manoeuvre until she had backed clear of the ship, at which moment, from
+for&rsquo;ard, arose a queer babel of howling and yelping, as numbers of
+drunken voices cried out that a man was overboard. The second mate sprang down
+the poop-ladder and darted past me along the deck. The mate, still on the
+slender, white-painted bridge, that seemed no more than a spider thread,
+surprised me by the activity with which he dashed along the bridge to the
+&rsquo;midship house, leaped upon the canvas-covered long-boat, and swung
+outboard where he might see. Before the men could clamber upon the rail the
+second mate was among them, and it was he who flung a coil of line overboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What impressed me particularly was the mental and muscular superiority of these
+two officers. Despite their age&mdash;the mate sixty-nine and the second mate
+at least fifty&mdash;their minds and their bodies had acted with the swiftness
+and accuracy of steel springs. They were potent. They were iron. They were
+perceivers, willers, and doers. They were as of another species compared with
+the sailors under them. While the latter, witnesses of the happening and
+directly on the spot, had been crying out in befuddled helplessness, and with
+slow wits and slower bodies been climbing upon the rail, the second mate had
+descended the steep ladder from the poop, covered two hundred feet of deck,
+sprung upon the rail, grasped the instant need of the situation, and cast the
+coil of line into the water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And of the same nature and quality had been the actions of Mr. Pike. He and Mr.
+Mellaire were masters over the wretched creatures of sailors by virtue of this
+remarkable difference of efficiency and will. Truly, they were more widely
+differentiated from the men under them than were the men under them
+differentiated from Hottentots&mdash;ay, and from monkeys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I, too, by this time, was standing on the big hawser-bitts in a position to see
+a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming away from the ship. He was
+a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some sort, and his face, in a clear glimpse I
+caught of it, was distorted by frenzy. His black eyes were maniacal. The line
+was so accurately flung by the second mate that it fell across the man&rsquo;s
+shoulders, and for several strokes his arms tangled in it ere he could swim
+clear. This accomplished, he proceeded to scream some wild harangue and once,
+as he uptossed his arms for emphasis, I saw in his hand the blade of a long
+knife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bells were jangling on the tug as it started to the rescue. I stole a look up
+at Captain West. He had walked to the port side of the poop, where, hands in
+pockets, he was glancing, now for&rsquo;ard at the struggling man, now aft at
+the tug. He gave no orders, betrayed no excitement, and appeared, I may well
+say, the most casual of spectators.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his clothes. I saw
+one bare arm, and then the other, appear. In his struggles he sometimes sank
+beneath the surface, but always he emerged, flourishing the knife and screaming
+his addled harangue. He even tried to escape the tug by diving and swimming
+underneath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I strolled for&rsquo;ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over the
+rail of the <i>Elsinore</i>. He was stark naked, covered with blood, and
+raving. He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places. From one wound in
+the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the pulse. He was a loathsome,
+non-human thing. I have seen a scared orang in a zoo, and for all the world
+this bestial-faced, mowing, gibbering thing reminded me of the orang. The
+sailors surrounded him, laying hands on him, withstraining him, the while they
+guffawed and cheered. Right and left the two mates shoved them away, and
+dragged the lunatic down the deck and into a room in the &rsquo;midship house.
+I could not help marking the strength of Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire. I had heard
+of the superhuman strength of madmen, but this particular madman was as a wisp
+of straw in their hands. Once into the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the struggling
+fool easily with one hand while he dispatched the second mate for marlin with
+which to tie the fellow&rsquo;s arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bughouse,&rdquo; Mr. Pike grinned at me. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen some
+bughouse crews in my time, but this one&rsquo;s the limit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;The man will bleed to
+death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And good riddance,&rdquo; he answered promptly. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have
+our hands full of him until we can lose him somehow. When he gets easy
+I&rsquo;ll sew him up, that&rsquo;s all, if I have to ease him with a clout of
+the jaw.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced at the mate&rsquo;s huge paw and appreciated its an&aelig;sthetic
+qualities. Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands still in
+pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky to the
+north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the drunken
+callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in pockets, impress upon
+me that I was in a different world from any I had known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say that Miss
+West was serving tea in the cabin.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The contrast, as I entered the cabin, was startling. All contrasts aboard the
+<i>Elsinore</i> promised to be startling. Instead of the cold, hard deck my
+feet sank into soft carpet. In place of the mean and narrow room, built of
+naked iron, where I had left the lunatic, I was in a spacious and beautiful
+apartment. With the bawling of the men&rsquo;s voices still in my ears, and
+with the pictures of their drink-puffed and filthy faces still vivid under my
+eyelids, I found myself greeted by a delicate-faced, prettily-gowned woman who
+sat beside a lacquered oriental table on which rested an exquisite tea-service
+of Canton china. All was repose and calm. The steward, noiseless-footed,
+expressionless, was a shadow, scarcely noticed, that drifted into the room on
+some service and drifted out again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not at once could I relax, and Miss West, serving my tea, laughed and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You look as if you had been seeing things. The steward tells me a man
+has been overboard. I fancy the cold water must have sobered him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I resented her unconcern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man is a lunatic,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;This ship is no place for
+him. He should be sent ashore to some hospital.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am afraid, if we begin that, we&rsquo;d have to send two-thirds of our
+complement ashore&mdash;one lump?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, please,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;But the man has terribly wounded
+himself. He is liable to bleed to death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at me for a moment, her gray eyes serious and scrutinizing, as she
+passed me my cup; then laughter welled up in her eyes, and she shook her head
+reprovingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now please don&rsquo;t begin the voyage by being shocked, Mr. Pathurst.
+Such things are very ordinary occurrences. You&rsquo;ll get used to them. You
+must remember some queer creatures go down to the sea in ships. The man is
+safe. Trust Mr. Pike to attend to his wounds. I&rsquo;ve never sailed with Mr.
+Pike, but I&rsquo;ve heard enough about him. Mr. Pike is quite a surgeon. Last
+voyage, they say, he performed a successful amputation, and so elated was he
+that he turned his attention on the carpenter, who happened to be suffering
+from some sort of indigestion. Mr. Pike was so convinced of the correctness of
+his diagnosis that he tried to bribe the carpenter into having his appendix
+removed.&rdquo; She broke off to laugh heartily, then added: &ldquo;They say he
+offered the poor man just pounds and pounds of tobacco to consent to the
+operation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But is it safe . . . for the . . . the working of the ship,&rdquo; I
+urged, &ldquo;to take such a lunatic along?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shrugged her shoulders, as if not intending to reply, then said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This incident is nothing. There are always several lunatics or idiots in
+every ship&rsquo;s company. And they always come aboard filled with whiskey and
+raving. I remember, once, when we sailed from Seattle, a long time ago, one
+such madman. He showed no signs of madness at all; just calmly seized two
+boarding-house runners and sprang overboard with them. We sailed the same day,
+before the bodies were recovered.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she shrugged her shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would you? The sea is hard, Mr. Pathurst. And for our sailors we
+get the worst type of men. I sometimes wonder where they find them. And we do
+our best with them, and somehow manage to make them help us carry on our work
+in the world. But they are low . . . low.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I listened, and studied her face, contrasting her woman&rsquo;s sensitivity
+and her soft pretty dress with the brute faces and rags of the men I had
+noticed, I could not help being convinced intellectually of the rightness of
+her position. Nevertheless, I was hurt sentimentally,&mdash;chiefly, I do
+believe, because of the very hardness and unconcern with which she enunciated
+her view. It was because she was a woman, and so different from the
+sea-creatures, that I resented her having received such harsh education in the
+school of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could not help remarking your father&rsquo;s&mdash;er, er <i>sang
+froid</i> during the occurrence.&rdquo; I ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He never took his hands from his pockets!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes sparkled as I nodded confirmation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I knew it! It&rsquo;s his way. I&rsquo;ve seen it so often. I remember
+when I was twelve years old&mdash;mother was alone&mdash;we were running into
+San Francisco. It was in the <i>Dixie</i>, a ship almost as big as this. There
+was a strong fair wind blowing, and father did not take a tug. We sailed right
+through the Golden Gate and up the San Francisco water-front. There was a swift
+flood tide, too; and the men, both watches, were taking in sail as fast as they
+could.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now the fault was the steamboat captain&rsquo;s. He miscalculated our
+speed and tried to cross our bow. Then came the collision, and the
+<i>Dixie&rsquo;s</i> bow cut through that steamboat, cabin and hull. There were
+hundreds of passengers, men, women, and children. Father never took his hands
+from his pockets. He sent the mate for&rsquo;ard to superintend rescuing the
+passengers, who were already climbing on to our bowsprit and forecastle-head,
+and in a voice no different from what he&rsquo;d use to ask some one to pass
+the butter he told the second mate to set all sail. And he told him which sails
+to begin with.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why set more sails?&rdquo; I interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because he could see the situation. Don&rsquo;t you see, the steamboat
+was cut wide open. All that kept her from sinking instantly was the bow of the
+<i>Dixie</i> jammed into her side. By setting more sail and keeping before the
+wind, he continued to keep the bow of the <i>Dixie</i> jammed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was terribly frightened. People who had sprung or fallen overboard
+were drowning on each side of us, right in my sight, as we sailed along up the
+water-front. But when I looked at father, there he was, just as I had always
+known him, hands in pockets, walking slowly up and down, now giving an order to
+the wheel&mdash;you see, he had to direct the <i>Dixie&rsquo;s</i> course
+through all the shipping&mdash;now watching the passengers swarming over our
+bow and along our deck, now looking ahead to see his way through the ships at
+anchor. Sometimes he did glance at the poor, drowning ones, but he was not
+concerned with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, there were numbers drowned, but by keeping his hands in his
+pockets and his head cool he saved hundreds of lives. Not until the last person
+was off the steamboat&mdash;he sent men aboard to make sure&mdash;did he take
+off the press of sail. And the steamboat sank at once.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She ceased, and looked at me with shining eyes for approbation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was splendid,&rdquo; I acknowledged. &ldquo;I admire the quiet man of
+power, though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
+unearthly and beyond human. I can&rsquo;t conceive of myself acting that way,
+and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor devil was in the
+water than all the rest of the onlookers put together.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Father suffers!&rdquo; she defended loyally. &ldquo;Only he does not
+show it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug <i>Britannia</i> in sight. She
+was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea. Strolling
+for&rsquo;ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the forecastle by Sundry
+Buyers, forever tenderly pressing his abdomen with his hands. Another man was
+helping Sundry Buyers at routing out the sailors. I asked Mr. Pike who the man
+was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nancy&mdash;my bosun; ain&rsquo;t he a peach?&rdquo; was the answer I
+got, and from the mate&rsquo;s manner of enunciation I was quite aware that
+&ldquo;Nancy&rdquo; had been used derisively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he had lived
+a very long time. He was toothless and sad and weary of movement. His eyes were
+slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face was sickly yellow. Narrow-shouldered,
+sunken-chested, with cheeks cavernously hollow, he looked like a man in the
+last stages of consumption. Little life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed
+even less life. And these were bosuns!&mdash;bosuns of the fine American
+sailing-ship <i>Elsinore</i>! Never had any illusion of mine taken a more
+distressing cropper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless, were afraid
+of the men they were supposed to boss. And the men! Dor&eacute; could never
+have conjured a more delectable hell&rsquo;s broth. For the first time I saw
+them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns for being afraid of them. They
+did not walk. They slouched and shambled, some even tottered, as from weakness
+or drink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West had just
+told me&mdash;that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots in their
+crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic or feeble-minded. And I,
+too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage could have been obtained.
+There was something wrong with all of them. Their bodies were twisted, their
+faces distorted, and almost without exception they were under-sized. The
+several quite fairly large men I marked were vacant-faced. One man, however,
+large and unmistakably Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking and
+muttering to himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his
+head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue
+eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him
+O&rsquo;Sullivan. But O&rsquo;Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the
+heels of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth,
+followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed a marvel
+his flesh could hold his frame together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I have ever
+beheld. He was a twisted oaf of a man. Face and body were twisted as with the
+pain of a thousand years of torture. His was the face of an ill-treated and
+feeble-minded faun. His large black eyes were bright, eager, and filled with
+pain; and they flashed questioningly from face to face and to everything about.
+They were so pitifully alert, those eyes, as if forever astrain to catch the
+clue to some perplexing and threatening enigma. Not until afterwards did I
+learn the cause of this. He was stone deaf, having had his ear-drums destroyed
+in the boiler explosion which had wrecked the rest of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the men from a
+distance. His keen, Asiatic face, quick with intelligence, was a relief to the
+eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the forecastle with a
+leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was something wrong with him, too. He
+was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his high spirits and low mentality
+united to make him a clown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I watched him.
+The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer, and it was plain that he
+was disgusted with the quality of cattle delivered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something the matter with the last mother&rsquo;s son of them,&rdquo; he
+growled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still they came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly adjudged a
+drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced and wrinkled, with
+beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small, well-fleshed man, who seemed to
+my eye the most normal and least unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared.
+But Mr. Pike&rsquo;s eye was better trained than mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with <i>you</i>?&rdquo; he snarled at the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing, sir,&rdquo; the fellow answered, stopping immediately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your name?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike never spoke to a sailor save with a snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Charles Davis, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you limping about?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t limpin&rsquo;, sir,&rdquo; the man answered respectfully,
+and, at a nod of dismissal from the mate, marched off jauntily along the deck
+with a hoodlum swing to the shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a sailor all right,&rdquo; the mate grumbled; &ldquo;but
+I&rsquo;ll bet you a pound of tobacco or a month&rsquo;s wages there&rsquo;s
+something wrong with him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The forecastle now seemed empty, but the mate turned on the bosuns with his
+customary snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What in hell are you doing? Sleeping? Think this is a rest cure? Get in
+there an&rsquo; rustle &rsquo;em out!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sundry Buyers pressed his abdomen gingerly and hesitated, while Nancy, his face
+one dogged, long-suffering bleakness, reluctantly entered the forecastle. Then,
+from inside, we heard oaths, vile and filthy, urgings and expostulations on the
+part of Nancy, meekly and pleadingly uttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noted the grim and savage look that came on Mr. Pike&rsquo;s face, and was
+prepared for I knew not what awful monstrosities to emerge from the forecastle.
+Instead, to my surprise, came three fellows who were strikingly superior to the
+ruck that had preceded them. I looked to see the mate&rsquo;s face soften to
+some sort of approval. On the contrary, his blue eyes contracted to narrow
+slits, the snarl of his voice was communicated to his lips, so that he seemed
+like a dog about to bite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the three fellows. They were small men, all; and young men, anywhere
+between twenty-five and thirty. Though roughly dressed, they were well dressed,
+and under their clothes their bodily movements showed physical well-being.
+Their faces were keen cut, intelligent. And though I felt there was something
+queer about them, I could not divine what it was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here were no ill-fed, whiskey-poisoned men, such as the rest of the sailors,
+who, having drunk up their last pay-days, had starved ashore until they had
+received and drunk up their advance money for the present voyage. These three,
+on the other hand were supple and vigorous. Their movements were spontaneously
+quick and accurate. Perhaps it was the way they looked at me, with incurious
+yet calculating eyes that nothing escaped. They seemed so worldly wise, so
+indifferent, so sure of themselves. I was confident they were not sailors. Yet,
+as shore-dwellers, I could not place them. They were a type I had never
+encountered. Possibly I can give a better idea of them by describing what
+occurred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they passed before us they favoured Mr. Pike with the same indifferent, keen
+glances they gave me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s your name&mdash;you?&rdquo; Mr. Pike barked at the first of
+the trio, evidently a hybrid Irish-Jew. Jewish his nose unmistakably was.
+Equally unmistakable was the Irish of his eyes, and jaw, and upper lip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three had immediately stopped, and, though they did not look directly at
+one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference. Another of the
+trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic, Babylonish and Latin
+strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so crass as a wink or a nod. I
+almost doubted that I had intercepted it, and yet I knew he had communicated a
+warning to his fellows. More a shade of expression that had crossed his eyes,
+or a glint in them of sudden light&mdash;or whatever it was, it carried the
+message.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Murphy,&rdquo; the other answered the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Murphy shrugged his shoulders in token that he did not understand. It was the
+poise of the man, of the three of them, the cool poise that impressed me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you address any officer on this ship you&rsquo;ll say
+&lsquo;sir,&rsquo;&rdquo; Mr. Pike explained, his voice as harsh as his face
+was forbidding. &ldquo;Did you get <i>that</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes . . . sir,&rdquo; Murphy drawled with deliberate slowness. &ldquo;I
+gotcha.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; Mr. Pike roared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; Murphy answered, so softly and carelessly that it irritated
+the mate to further bullyragging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Murphy&rsquo;s too long,&rdquo; he announced.
+&ldquo;Nosey&rsquo;ll do you aboard this craft. Got <i>that</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I gotcha . . . sir,&rdquo; came the reply, insolent in its very softness
+and unconcern. &ldquo;Nosey Murphy goes . . . sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he laughed&mdash;the three of them laughed, if laughter it might be
+called that was laughter without sound or facial movement. The eyes alone
+laughed, mirthlessly and cold-bloodedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly Mr. Pike was not enjoying himself with these baffling personalities.
+He turned upon the leader, the one who had given the warning and who looked the
+admixture of all that was Mediterranean and Semitic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s <i>your</i> name?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bert Rhine . . . sir,&rdquo; was the reply, in tones as soft and
+careless and silkily irritating as the other&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And <i>you</i>?&rdquo;&mdash;this to the remaining one, the youngest of
+the trio, a dark-eyed, olive-skinned fellow with a face most striking in its
+cameo-like beauty. American-born, I placed him, of immigrants from Southern
+Italy&mdash;from Naples, or even Sicily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Twist . . . sir,&rdquo; he answered, precisely in the same manner as the
+others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too long,&rdquo; the mate sneered. &ldquo;The Kid&rsquo;ll do you. Got
+<i>that</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I gotcha . . . sir. Kid Twist&rsquo;ll do me . . . sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kid&rsquo;ll do!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kid . . . sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the three laughed their silent, mirthless laugh. By this time Mr. Pike was
+beside himself with a rage that could find no excuse for action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now I&rsquo;m going to tell you something, the bunch of you, for the
+good of your health.&rdquo; The mate&rsquo;s voice grated with the rage he was
+suppressing. &ldquo;I know your kind. You&rsquo;re dirt. D&rsquo;ye get
+<i>that</i>? You&rsquo;re dirt. And on this ship you&rsquo;ll be treated as
+dirt. You&rsquo;ll do your work like men, or I&rsquo;ll know the reason why.
+The first time one of you bats an eye, or even looks like batting an eye, he
+gets his. D&rsquo;ye get that? Now get out. Get along for&rsquo;ard to the
+windlass.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you make of them?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The limit,&rdquo; he grunted. &ldquo;I know their kidney. They&rsquo;ve
+done time, the three of them. They&rsquo;re just plain sweepings of
+hell&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on Number Two
+hatch. Sprawled out on the hatch were five or six men, among them Larry, the
+tatterdemalion who had called him &ldquo;old stiff&rdquo; earlier in the
+afternoon. That Larry had not obeyed orders was patent, for he was sitting with
+his back propped against his sea-bag, which ought to have been in the
+forecastle. Also, he and the group with him ought to have been for&rsquo;ard
+manning the windlass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate stepped upon the hatch and towered over the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get up,&rdquo; he ordered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Larry made an effort, groaned, and failed to get up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t, sir. I was drunk last night an&rsquo; slept in Jefferson
+Market. An&rsquo; this mornin&rsquo; I was froze tight, sir. They had to pry me
+loose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stiff with the cold you were, eh?&rdquo; the mate grinned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s well ye might say it, sir,&rdquo; Larry answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you feel like an old stiff, eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Larry blinked with the troubled, querulous eyes of a monkey. He was beginning
+to apprehend he knew not what, and he knew that bending over him was a
+man-master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll just be showin&rsquo; you what an old stiff feels like,
+anyways.&rdquo; Mr. Pike mimicked the other&rsquo;s brogue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now I shall tell what I saw happen. Please remember what I have said of the
+huge paws of Mr. Pike, the fingers much longer than mine and twice as thick,
+the wrists massive-boned, the arm-bones and the shoulder-bones of the same
+massive order. With one flip of his right hand, with what I might call an
+open-handed, lifting, upward slap, save that it was the ends of the fingers
+only that touched Larry&rsquo;s face, he lifted Larry into the air, sprawling
+him backward on his back across his sea-bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man alongside of Larry emitted a menacing growl and started to spring
+belligerently to his feet. But he never reached his feet. Mr. Pike, with the
+back of same right hand, open, smote the man on the side of the face. The loud
+smack of the impact was startling. The mate&rsquo;s strength was amazing. The
+blow looked so easy, so effortless; it had seemed like the lazy stroke of a
+good-natured bear, but in it was such a weight of bone and muscle that the man
+went down sidewise and rolled off the hatch on to the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment, lurching aimlessly along, appeared O&rsquo;Sullivan. A sudden
+access of muttering, on his part, reached Mr. Pike&rsquo;s ear, and Mr. Pike,
+instantly keen as a wild animal, his paw in the act of striking
+O&rsquo;Sullivan, whipped out like a revolver shot, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+that?&rdquo; Then he noted the sense-struck face of O&rsquo;Sullivan and
+withheld the blow. &ldquo;Bug-house,&rdquo; Mr. Pike commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Involuntarily I had glanced to see if Captain West was on the poop, and found
+that we were hidden from the poop by the &rsquo;midship house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike, taking no notice of the man who lay groaning on the deck, stood over
+Larry, who was likewise groaning. The rest of the sprawling men were on their
+feet, subdued and respectful. I, too, was respectful of this terrific, aged
+figure of a man. The exhibition had quite convinced me of the verity of his
+earlier driving and killing days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s the old stiff now?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis me, sir,&rdquo; Larry moaned contritely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Larry got up without any difficulty at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now get for&rsquo;ard to the windlass! The rest of you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they went, sullenly, shamblingly, like the cowed brutes they were.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I climbed the ladder on the side of the for&rsquo;ard house (which house
+contained, as I discovered, the forecastle, the galley, and the donkey-engine
+room), and went part way along the bridge to a position by the foremast, where
+I could observe the crew heaving up anchor. The <i>Britannia</i> was alongside,
+and we were getting under way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or variously
+engaged on the forecastle-head. Of the crew proper were two watches of fifteen
+men each. In addition were sailmakers, boys, bosuns, and the carpenter. Nearly
+forty men were they, but such men! They were sad and lifeless. There was no
+vim, no go, no activity. Every step and movement was an effort, as if they were
+dead men raised out of coffins or sick men dragged from hospital beds. Sick
+they were&mdash;whiskey-poisoned. Starved they were, and weak from poor
+nutrition. And worst of all, they were imbecile and lunatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked aloft at the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and carrying
+huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel masts and yards gave
+way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and stays turned into a delicate
+tracery of spider-thread against the sky. That such a wretched muck of men
+should be able to work this magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and
+peril of the sea was beyond all seeming. I remembered the two mates, the
+super-efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike&mdash;could
+they make this human wreckage do it? They, at least, evinced no doubts of their
+ability. The sea? If this feat of mastery were possible, then clear it was that
+I knew nothing of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men who trod
+the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These were not the brisk,
+devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old clipper-ship days;
+who fought their officers, who had the points of their sheath-knives broken
+off, who killed and were killed, but who did their work as men. These men,
+these shambling carcasses at the windlass&mdash;I looked, and looked, and
+vainly I strove to conjure the vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm,
+&ldquo;clearing the raffle,&rdquo; as Kipling puts it, &ldquo;with their clasp
+knives in their teeth.&rdquo; Why didn&rsquo;t they sing a chanty as they hove
+the anchor up? In the old days, as I had read, the anchor always came up to the
+rollicking sailor songs of sea-chested men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I tired of watching the spiritless performance, and went aft on an exploring
+trip along the slender bridge. It was a beautiful structure, strong yet light,
+traversing the length of the ship in three aerial leaps. It spanned from the
+forecastle-head to the forecastle-house, next to the &rsquo;midship house, and
+then to the poop. The poop, which was really the roof or deck over all the
+cabin space below, and which occupied the whole after-part of the ship, was
+very large. It was broken only by the half-round and half-covered wheel-house
+at the very stern and by the chart-house. On either side of the latter two
+doors opened into a tiny hallway. This, in turn, gave access to the chart-room
+and to a stairway that led down into the cabin quarters beneath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I peeped into the chart-room and was greeted with a smile by Captain West. He
+was lolling back comfortably in a swing chair, his feet cocked on the desk
+opposite. On a broad, upholstered couch sat the pilot. Both were smoking
+cigars; and, lingering for a moment to listen to the conversation, I grasped
+that the pilot was an ex-sea-captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I descended the stairs, from Miss West&rsquo;s room came a sound of humming
+and bustling, as she settled her belongings. The energy she displayed, to judge
+by the cheerful noises of it, was almost perturbing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Passing by the pantry, I put my head inside the door to greet the steward and
+courteously let him know that I was aware of his existence. Here, in his little
+realm, it was plain that efficiency reigned. Everything was spotless and in
+order, and I could have wished and wished vainly for a more noiseless servant
+than he ashore. His face, as he regarded me, had as little or as much
+expression as the Sphinx. But his slant, black eyes were bright, with
+intelligence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think of the crew?&rdquo; I asked, in order to put words to
+my invasion of his castle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Buggy-house,&rdquo; he answered promptly, with a disgusted shake of the
+head. &ldquo;Too much buggy-house. All crazy. You see. No good. Rotten. Down to
+hell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all, but it verified my own judgment. While it might be true, as Miss
+West had said, that every ship&rsquo;s crew contained several lunatics and
+idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew contained far more than
+several. In fact, and as it was to turn out, our crew, even in these degenerate
+sailing days, was an unusual crew in so far as its helplessness and
+worthlessness were beyond the average.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found my own room (in reality it was two rooms) delightful. Wada had unpacked
+and stored away my entire outfit of clothing, and had filled numerous shelves
+with the library I had brought along. Everything was in order and place, from
+my shaving outfit in the drawer beside the wash-basin, and my sea-boots and
+oilskins hung ready to hand, to my writing materials on the desk, before which
+a swing arm-chair, leather-upholstered and screwed solidly to the floor,
+invited me. My pyjamas and dressing-gown were out. My slippers, in their
+accustomed place by the bed, also invited me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, aft, all was fitness, intelligence. On deck it was what I have
+described&mdash;a nightmare spawn of creatures, assumably human, but malformed,
+mentally and physically, into caricatures of men. Yes, it was an unusual crew;
+and that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire could whip it into the efficient shape
+necessary to work this vast and intricate and beautiful fabric of a ship was
+beyond all seeming of possibility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Depressed as I was by what I had just witnessed on deck, there came to me, as I
+leaned back in my chair and opened the second volume of George Moore&rsquo;s
+<i>Hail and Farewell</i>, a premonition that the voyage was to be disastrous.
+But then, as I looked about the room, measured its generous space, realized
+that I was more comfortably situated than I had ever been on any passenger
+steamer, I dismissed foreboding thoughts and caught a pleasant vision of
+myself, through weeks and months, catching up with all the necessary reading
+which I had so long neglected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew. No, he hadn&rsquo;t, but the
+steward had said that in all his years at sea this was the worst crew he had
+ever seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He say, all crazy, no sailors, rotten,&rdquo; Wada said. &ldquo;He say
+all big fools and bime by much trouble. &lsquo;You see,&rsquo; he say all the
+time. &lsquo;You see, You see.&rsquo; He pretty old man&mdash;fifty-five years,
+he say. Very smart man for Chinaman. Just now, first time for long time, he go
+to sea. Before, he have big business in San Francisco. Then he get much
+trouble&mdash;police. They say he opium smuggle. Oh, big, big trouble. But he
+catch good lawyer. He no go to jail. But long time lawyer work, and when
+trouble all finish lawyer got all his business, all his money, everything. Then
+he go to sea, like before. He make good money. He get sixty-five dollars a
+month on this ship. But he don&rsquo;t like. Crew all crazy. When this time
+finish he leave ship, go back start business in San Francisco.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, when I had Wada open one of the ports for ventilation, I could hear the
+gurgle and swish of water alongside, and I knew the anchor was up and that we
+were in the grip of the <i>Britannia</i>, towing down the Chesapeake to sea.
+The idea suggested itself that it was not too late. I could very easily abandon
+the adventure and return to Baltimore on the <i>Britannia</i> when she cast off
+the <i>Elsinore</i>. And then I heard a slight tinkling of china from the
+pantry as the steward proceeded to set the table, and, also, it was so warm and
+comfortable, and George Moore was so irritatingly fascinating.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+In every way dinner proved up beyond my expectations, and I registered a note
+that the cook, whoever or whatever he might be, was a capable man at his trade.
+Miss West served, and, though she and the steward were strangers, they worked
+together splendidly. I should have thought, from the smoothness of the service,
+that he was an old house servant who for years had known her every way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pilot ate in the chart-house, so that at table were the four of us that
+would always be at table together. Captain West and his daughter faced each
+other, while I, on the captain&rsquo;s right, faced Mr. Pike. This put Miss
+West across the corner on my right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike, his dark sack coat (put on for the meal) bulging and wrinkling over
+the lumps of muscles that padded his stooped shoulders, had nothing at all to
+say. But he had eaten too many years at captains&rsquo; tables not to have
+proper table manners. At first I thought he was abashed by Miss West&rsquo;s
+presence. Later, I decided it was due to the presence of the captain. For
+Captain West had a way with him that I was beginning to learn. Far removed as
+Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire were from the sailors, individuals as they were of an
+entirely different and superior breed, yet equally as different and far removed
+from his officers was Captain West. He was a serene and absolute aristocrat. He
+neither talked &ldquo;ship&rdquo; nor anything else to Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, Captain West&rsquo;s attitude toward me was that of a social
+equal. But then, I was a passenger. Miss West treated me the same way, but
+unbent more to Mr. Pike. And Mr. Pike, answering her with &ldquo;Yes,
+Miss,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No, Miss,&rdquo; ate good-manneredly and with his
+shaggy-browed gray eyes studied me across the table. I, too, studied him.
+Despite his violent past, killer and driver that he was, I could not help
+liking the man. He was honest, genuine. Almost more than for that, I liked him
+for the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave on the occasions when I reached the
+points of several funny stories. No man could laugh like that and be all bad. I
+was glad that it was he, and not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit opposite
+throughout the voyage. And I was very glad that Mr. Mellaire was not to eat
+with us at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am afraid that Miss West and I did most of the talking. She was breezy,
+vivacious, tonic, and I noted again that the delicate, almost fragile oval of
+her face was given the lie by her body. She was a robust, healthy young woman.
+That was undeniable. Not fat&mdash;heaven forbid!&mdash;not even plump; yet her
+lines had that swelling roundness that accompanies long, live muscles. She was
+full-bodied, vigorous; and yet not so full-bodied as she seemed. I remember
+with what surprise, when we arose from table, I noted her slender waist. At
+that moment I got the impression that she was willowy. And willowy she was,
+with a normal waist and with, in addition, always that informing bodily vigour
+that made her appear rounder and robuster than she really was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the health of her that interested me. When I studied her face more
+closely I saw that only the lines of the oval of it were delicate. Delicate it
+was not, nor fragile. The flesh was firm, and the texture of the skin was firm
+and fine as it moved over the firm muscles of face and neck. The neck was a
+beautiful and adequate pillar of white. Its flesh was firm, its skin fine, and
+it was muscular. The hands, too, attracted me&mdash;not small, but well-shaped,
+fine, white and strong, and well cared for. I could only conclude that she was
+an unusual captain&rsquo;s daughter, just as her father was an unusual captain
+and man. And their noses were alike, just the hint-touch of the beak of power
+and race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Miss West was telling of the unexpectedness of the voyage, of how
+suddenly she had decided to come&mdash;she accounted for it as a whim&mdash;and
+while she told of all the complications she had encountered in her haste of
+preparation, I found myself casting up a tally of the efficient ones on board
+the <i>Elsinore</i>. They were Captain West and his daughter, the two mates,
+myself, of course, Wada and the steward, and, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the
+cook. The dinner vouched for him. Thus I found our total of efficients to be
+eight. But the cook, the steward, and Wada were servants, not sailors, while
+Miss West and myself were supernumeraries. Remained to work, direct, do, but
+three efficients out of a total ship&rsquo;s company of forty-five. I had no
+doubt that other efficients there were; it seemed impossible that my first
+impression of the crew should be correct. There was the carpenter. He might, at
+his trade, be as good as the cook. Then the two sailmakers, whom I had not yet
+seen, might prove up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little later during the meal I ventured to talk about what had interested me
+and aroused my admiration, namely, the masterfulness with which Mr. Pike and
+Mr. Mellaire had gripped hold of that woeful, worthless crew. It was all new to
+me, I explained, but I appreciated the need of it. As I led up to the
+occurrence on Number Two hatch, when Mr. Pike had lifted up Larry and toppled
+him back with a mere slap from the ends of his fingers, I saw in Mr.
+Pike&rsquo;s eyes a warning, almost threatening, expression. Nevertheless, I
+completed my description of the episode.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I had quite finished there was a silence. Miss West was busy serving
+coffee from a copper percolator. Mr. Pike, profoundly occupied with cracking
+walnuts, could not quite hide the wicked, little, half-humorous,
+half-revengeful gleam in his eyes. But Captain West looked straight at me, but
+from oh! such a distance&mdash;millions and millions of miles away. His clear
+blue eyes were as serene as ever, his tones as low and soft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is the one rule I ask to be observed, Mr. Pathurst&mdash;we never
+discuss the sailors.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a facer to me, and with quite a pronounced fellow-feeling for Larry I
+hurriedly added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was not merely the discipline that interested me. It was the feat of
+strength.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sailors are trouble enough without our hearing about them, Mr.
+Pathurst,&rdquo; Captain West went on, as evenly and imperturbably as if I had
+not spoken. &ldquo;I leave the handling of the sailors to my officers.
+That&rsquo;s their business, and they are quite aware that I tolerate no
+undeserved roughness or severity.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike&rsquo;s harsh face carried the faintest shadow of an amused grin as he
+stolidly regarded the tablecloth. I glanced to Miss West for sympathy. She
+laughed frankly, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, father never has any sailors. And it&rsquo;s a good plan,
+too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very good plan,&rdquo; Mr. Pike muttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Miss West kindly led the talk away from that subject, and soon had us
+laughing with a spirited recital of a recent encounter of hers with a Boston
+cab-driver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dinner over, I stepped to my room in quest of cigarettes, and incidentally
+asked Wada about the cook. Wada was always a great gatherer of information.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His name Louis,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;He Chinaman, too. No; only half
+Chinaman. Other half Englishman. You know one island Napoleon he stop long time
+and bime by die that island?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;St. Helena,&rdquo; I prompted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that place Louis he born. He talk very good English.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment, entering the hall from the deck, Mr. Mellaire, just relieved by
+the mate, passed me on his way to the big room in the stern where the second
+table was set. His &ldquo;Good evening, sir,&rdquo; was as stately and
+courteous as any southern gentleman of the old days could have uttered it. And
+yet I could not like the man. His outward seeming was so at variance with the
+personality that resided within. Even as he spoke and smiled I felt that from
+inside his skull he was watching me, studying me. And somehow, in a flash of
+intuition, I knew not why, I was reminded of the three strange young men,
+routed last from the forecastle, to whom Mr. Pike had read the law. They, too,
+had given me a similar impression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind Mr. Mellaire slouched a self-conscious, embarrassed individual, with the
+face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant. His feet were even larger than
+Mr. Pike&rsquo;s, but the hands&mdash;I shot a quick glance to see&mdash;were
+not so large as Mr. Pike&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they passed I looked inquiry to Wada.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He carpenter. He sat second table. His name Sam Lavroff. He come from
+New York on ship. Steward say he very young for carpenter, maybe twenty-two,
+three years old.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I approached the open port over my desk I again heard the swish and gurgle
+of water and again realized that we were under way. So steady and noiseless was
+our progress, that, say seated at table, it never entered one&rsquo;s head that
+we were moving or were anywhere save on the solid land. I had been used to
+steamers all my life, and it was difficult immediately to adjust myself to the
+absence of the propeller-thrust vibration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what do you think?&rdquo; I asked Wada, who, like myself, had
+never made a sailing-ship voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled politely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very funny ship. Very funny sailors. I don&rsquo;t know. Mebbe all
+right. We see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think trouble?&rdquo; I asked pointedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think sailors very funny,&rdquo; he evaded.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for&rsquo;ard along the deck to where
+work was going on. Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed in the starlight.
+Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I might judge, who was only the
+veriest tyro in such matters. The indistinguishable shapes of men, in long
+lines, pulled on ropes. They pulled in sick and dogged silence, though Mr.
+Pike, ubiquitous, snarled out orders and rapped out oaths from every angle upon
+their miserable heads.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever proceeded so
+sadly and blunderingly to sea. Ere long Mr. Mellaire joined Mr. Pike in the
+struggle of directing the men. It was not yet eight in the evening, and all
+hands were at work. They did not seem to know the ropes. Time and again, when
+the half-hearted suggestions of the bosuns had been of no avail, I saw one or
+the other of the mates leap to the rail and put the right rope in the hands of
+the men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones. Up aloft, from sounds
+and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who were at least a little
+seaman-like, loosing the sails.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope that hoisted
+a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with painfully slow movements.
+&ldquo;Walk away with it!&rdquo; Mr. Pike would yell. And perhaps for two or
+three yards they would manage to walk with the rope ere they came to a halt
+like stalled horses on a hill. And yet, did either of the mates spring in and
+add his strength, they were able to move right along the deck without stopping.
+Either of the mates, old men that they were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen
+of the wretched creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is what sailin&rsquo;s come to,&rdquo; Mr. Pike paused to snort in
+my ear. &ldquo;This ain&rsquo;t the place for an officer down here pulling and
+hauling. But what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure they do. Want to hear &rsquo;em?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that
+I&rsquo;d like to very much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you bosun!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled. &ldquo;Wake up! Start a song!
+Topsail halyards!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was pressing
+his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness freezing upon
+his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could have
+issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and
+indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and
+crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words poor Nancy sang were:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Away, way, way, yar,<br />
+We&rsquo;ll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quit it! Quit it!&rdquo; Mr. Pike roared. &ldquo;This ain&rsquo;t a
+funeral! Ain&rsquo;t there one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It&rsquo;s a
+topsail-yard&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of the
+men&rsquo;s hands to put into them the right rope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, bosun! Break her out!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers&rsquo; voice, cracked and crazy and
+even more lugubrious than Nancy&rsquo;s:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Then up aloft that yard must go,<br />
+Whiskey for my Johnny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two men feebly
+mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin and lifting
+his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;And whiskey killed the old man, too,<br />
+Whiskey for my Johnny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the work and to
+the chorused emphasis of &ldquo;Whiskey for my Johnny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive, until he
+interrupted the song to cry &ldquo;Belay!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again maundering
+and futile things, getting in one another&rsquo;s way, stumbling and shuffling
+through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they did take hold,
+invariably taking hold of the wrong rope first. Skulkers there were among them,
+too; and once, from for&rsquo;ard of the &rsquo;midship house, I heard smacks,
+and curses, and groans, and out of the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on
+their heels Mr. Pike, who chanted a recital of the distressing things that
+would befall them if he caught them at such tricks again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further, so I
+strolled aft and climbed the poop. In the lee of the chart-house Captain West
+and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down. Passing on aft, I saw steering at
+the wheel the weazened little old man I had noted earlier in the day. In the
+light of the binnacle his small blue eyes looked more malevolent than ever. So
+weazened and tiny was he, and so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they
+seemed of a height. His face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled, and in all
+seeming he was fifty years older than Mr. Pike. He was the most remarkable
+figure of a burnt-out, aged man one would expect to find able seaman on one of
+the proudest sailing-ships afloat. Later, through Wada, I was to learn that his
+name was Andy Fay and that he claimed no more years than sixty-three.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared up at the
+lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there. No, I decided I was
+not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of it was wrong. There were the
+cold hours I had waited on the pier-ends. There was Miss West coming along.
+There was the crew of broken men and lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek
+in the &rsquo;midship house still gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him
+up; and I was quite sure I would not care to witness such a transaction in
+surgery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of the voyage.
+So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in sailing-ships. So far
+as Captain West was concerned, crews did not exist. And as for Miss West, she
+was so abominably robust that she could not be anything else than an optimist
+in such matters. She had always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she
+would always live and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious
+personality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition that the
+red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to me&mdash;for I knew
+how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be. And for five months at
+least&mdash;there was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s offered wager of a pound of tobacco or a
+month&rsquo;s wages to that effect&mdash;I was to be pent on the same ship with
+her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was I that ere the
+voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love to me. Please do not
+mistake me. My certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my
+own desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of women as
+instinctive huntresses of men. In my experience women hunted men with quite the
+same blind tropism that marks the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the
+pursuit of attachable surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Call me blas&eacute;&mdash;I do not mind, if by blas&eacute; is meant the
+world-weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young
+man of thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these
+things&mdash;weary and in doubt. It was because of this state that I was
+undertaking the voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away from all
+these things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness had been
+brought about by the success of my play&mdash;my first play, as every one
+knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the doubt in my own mind,
+just as the success of my several volumes of verse had raised doubts. Was the
+public right? Were the critics right? Surely the function of the artist was to
+voice life, yet what did I know of life?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that afflicted me.
+Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts of isolating myself
+entirely from the world had hounded me. I had even canvassed the idea of going
+to Molokai and devoting the rest of my years to the lepers&mdash;I, who was
+thirty years old, and healthy and strong, who had no particular tragedy, who
+had a bigger income than I knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put
+my name on the lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned
+with&mdash;I was that mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very well.
+Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible fact&mdash;my
+sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact. This I knew: I had
+reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a life-climacteric of some
+sort. And I had diagnosed my own case and prescribed this voyage. And here was
+the atrociously healthy and profoundly feminine Miss West along&mdash;the very
+last ingredient I would have considered introducing into my prescription.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their
+persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not entirely
+unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world, and an income most
+dazzling&mdash;why shouldn&rsquo;t women pursue me? They would have pursued me
+had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic place alone, for the sake
+of my income alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes; and love! Did I not know love&mdash;lyric, passionate, mad, romantic love?
+That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and sung and sobbed
+and sighed&mdash;yes, and known grief, and buried my dead. But it was so long
+ago. How young I was&mdash;turned twenty-four! And after that I had learned the
+bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I had laughed again and
+done my share of philandering with the pretty, ferocious moths that fluttered
+around the light of my fortune and artistry; and after that, in turn, I had
+retired disgusted from the lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking
+adventures in the realm of mind. And here I was, on board the <i>Elsinore</i>,
+unhorsed by my encounters with the problems of the ultimate, carried off the
+field with a broken pate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I could not
+help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as she made her little
+nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the everlasting mystery of woman.
+Yes, I, with all the futuristic contempt for woman, am ever caught up afresh by
+the mystery of woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and possessing,
+fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than Lucifer and as prideless,
+holds a perpetual, almost morbid, attraction for the thinker. What is this
+flame of her, blazing through all her contradictions and
+ignobilities?&mdash;this ruthless passion for life, always for life, more life
+on the planet? At times it seems to me brazen, and awful, and soulless. At
+times I am made petulant by it. And at other times I am swayed by the sublimity
+of it. No; there is no escape from woman. Always, as a savage returns to a dark
+glen where goblins are and gods may be, so do I return to the contemplation of
+woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike&rsquo;s voice interrupted my musings. From for&rsquo;ard, on the main
+deck, I heard him snarl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the main-topsail-yard, there!&mdash;if you cut that gasket I&rsquo;ll
+split your damned skull!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he called to I
+concluded was the training-ship boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!&rdquo; he cried.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t make those gaskets up! Fetch &rsquo;em in along the yard and
+make fast to the tye!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my hand went out
+to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate&rsquo;s voice rang out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, you gentlemen&rsquo;s sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively
+now!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I did not sleep well. To begin with, I read late. Not till two in the morning
+did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp which Wada had purchased
+and installed for me. I was asleep immediately&mdash;perfect sleep being
+perhaps my greatest gift; but almost immediately I was awake again. And
+thereafter, with dozings and cat-naps and restless tossings, I struggled to win
+to sleep, then gave it up. For of all things, in my state of jangled nerves, to
+be afflicted with hives! And still again, to be afflicted with hives in cold
+winter weather!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated skin in
+Vernon Lee&rsquo;s delightful screed against William James, and his &ldquo;will
+to believe.&rdquo; I was on the weather side of the ship, and from overhead,
+through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer on watch. I knew
+that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and wondered whether they were Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s or the pilot&rsquo;s. Somebody above there was awake. The work
+was going on, the vigilant seeing and overseeing, that, I could plainly
+conclude, would go on through every hour of all the hours on the voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At half-past four I heard the steward&rsquo;s alarm go off, instantly
+suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in through my
+open door. What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada had been with me
+through too many years for me to doubt that he had given the steward precise
+instructions and turned over to him my coffee and my coffee-making apparatus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward was a jewel. In ten minutes he served me with a perfect cup of
+coffee. I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found me, breakfast in
+bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck. We were still towing, but all
+sails were set to a light favouring breeze from the north. In the chart-room
+Captain West and the pilot were smoking cigars. At the wheel I noted what I
+decided at once was an efficient. He was not a large man; if anything he was
+undersized. But his countenance was broad-browed and intelligently formed. Tom,
+I later learned, was his name&mdash;Tom Spink, an Englishman. He was blue-eyed,
+fair-skinned, well-grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty years of age. His
+reply of &ldquo;Good morning, sir&rdquo; was cheery, and he smiled as he
+uttered the simple phrase. He did not look sailor-like, as did Henry, the
+training-ship boy; and yet I felt at once that he was a sailor, and an able
+one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
+admitted that the man was the &ldquo;best of the boiling.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and her vital,
+springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing her contacts. On
+asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly, she demanded an
+explanation. I told her of my affliction of hives and showed her the lumps on
+my wrists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your blood needs thinning and cooling,&rdquo; she adjudged promptly.
+&ldquo;Wait a minute. I&rsquo;ll see what can be done for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand a part
+glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream of tartar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drink it,&rdquo; she ordered, as a matter of course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I drank it. And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-chair with a
+second dose of the stuff. Also she reproached me soundly for permitting Wada to
+feed meat to Possum. It was from her that Wada and I learned how mortal a sin
+it was to give meat to a young puppy. Furthermore, she laid down the law and
+the diet for Possum, not alone to me and Wada, but to the steward, the
+carpenter, and Mr. Mellaire. Of the latter two, because they ate by themselves
+in the big after-room and because Possum played there, she was especially
+suspicious; and she was outspoken in voicing her suspicions to their faces. The
+carpenter mumbled embarrassed asseverations in broken English of past, present,
+and future innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before her on
+his huge feet. Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s protestations were of the same nature, save
+that they were made with the grace and suavity of a Chesterfield.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, Possum&rsquo;s diet raised quite a tempest in the <i>Elsinore</i>
+teapot, and by the time it was over Miss West had established this particular
+contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the mutual owners of the
+puppy. I noticed, later in the day, that it was to Miss West that Wada went for
+instructions as to the quantity of warm water he must use to dilute
+Possum&rsquo;s condensed milk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook. In the afternoon I made a trip
+for&rsquo;ard to the galley to make his acquaintance. To all intents he was a
+Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by speech alone, he was an
+Englishman. In fact, so cultured was his speech that I can fairly say it was
+vested with an Oxford accent. He, too, was old, fully sixty&mdash;he
+acknowledged fifty-nine. Three things about him were markedly conspicuous: his
+smile, that embraced all of his clean-shaven Asiatic face and Asiatic eyes; his
+even-rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which I deemed false until Wada
+ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands and feet. It was his hands,
+ridiculously small and beautifully modelled, that led my scrutiny to his feet.
+They, too, were ridiculously small and very neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had put the pilot off at midday, but the <i>Britannia</i> towed us well into
+the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide about us and the
+land a faint blur on the western horizon. Here, at the moment of leaving the
+tug, we made our &ldquo;departure&rdquo;&mdash;that is to say, technically
+began the voyage, despite the fact that we had already travelled a full
+twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the poop-rail
+gazing for&rsquo;ard, when Miss West joined me. She had been busy below all
+day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of air. She surveyed the
+sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five minutes, then remarked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The barometer&rsquo;s very high&mdash;30.60. This light north wind
+won&rsquo;t last. It will either go into a calm or work around into a
+north-east gale.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which would you prefer?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The gale, by all means. It will help us off the land, and it will put me
+through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly. Oh, yes,&rdquo; she added,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the beginning of
+every voyage. You probably won&rsquo;t see me for a couple of days now.
+That&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;ve been so busy getting settled first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at
+sea,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ve seen father sea-sick on occasion,&rdquo; she answered.
+&ldquo;Yes, and some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever
+known.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting pacing up
+and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck below us.
+To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike,&rdquo; Miss West remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The worst ever,&rdquo; he growled, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;ve seen some
+pretty bad ones. We&rsquo;re teachin&rsquo; them the ropes just now&mdash;most
+of &rsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They look starved,&rdquo; I commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are, they almost always are,&rdquo; Miss West answered, and her
+eyes roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer&rsquo;s fashion I had
+marked in Mr. Pike. &ldquo;But they&rsquo;ll fatten up with regular hours, no
+whiskey, and solid food&mdash;won&rsquo;t they, Mr. Pike?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, sure. They always do. And you&rsquo;ll see them liven up when we get
+&rsquo;em in hand . . . maybe. They&rsquo;re a measly lot, though.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed to have
+flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us, under Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs, between
+the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one another. The
+slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these small sails led me to
+ask:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
+were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an earthquake
+with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from both sides of a
+street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do?&rdquo; Miss West answered for him. &ldquo;We&rsquo;d get the sail
+off. Oh, it can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it
+couldn&rsquo;t, I should have been drowned long ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; Mr. Pike upheld her. &ldquo;So would I.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in a
+pinch,&rdquo; Miss West went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big paws,
+relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite unconsciously
+tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted fresh abrasions on the
+knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from some recollection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most
+hopeless crew. It was in the <i>Lallah Rookh</i>&mdash;you remember her, Mr.
+Pike?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your father&rsquo;s fifth command,&rdquo; he nodded. &ldquo;Lost on the
+West Coast afterwards&mdash;went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave.
+Parted her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on
+her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
+bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where the
+boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number of them were
+shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them when they were first
+sent aloft.&rdquo; Again she laughed. &ldquo;It was better than circus clowns.
+And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when it began to blow
+up and we began to shorten down. And then our mates performed miracles. You
+remember Mr. Harding&mdash;Silas Harding?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t I though!&rdquo; Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically.
+&ldquo;He was some man, and he must have been an old man even then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was, and a terrible man,&rdquo; she concurred, and added, almost
+reverently: &ldquo;And a wonderful man.&rdquo; She turned her face to me.
+&ldquo;He was our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But Mr.
+Harding got the sail off the <i>Lallah Rookh</i> just the same. What I wanted
+to tell you was this:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
+those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail. How far
+would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me see . . . the <i>Lallah Rookh</i>.&rdquo; Mr. Pike paused to
+consider. &ldquo;Oh, say around a hundred feet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp&mdash;and he must
+already have got a taste of Mr. Harding&mdash;fell off the lower-topsail-yard.
+I was only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was falling
+from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck. But he fell into the
+belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a somersault, and landed on
+his feet on deck and unhurt. And he landed right alongside of Mr. Harding,
+facing him. I don&rsquo;t know which was the more astonished, but I think Mr.
+Harding was, for he stood there petrified. He had expected the man to be
+killed. Not so the man. He took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump
+for the rigging and climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man&rsquo;s nerves, falling to
+apparent death that way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;d been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess,&rdquo; was Mr.
+Pike&rsquo;s remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by what I had
+seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary. But that a young woman
+of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things and be so saturated in
+this side of ship life was not nice. It was not nice for me, though it
+interested me, I confess,&mdash;and strengthened my grip on reality. Yet it
+meant a hardening of one&rsquo;s fibres, and I did not like to think of Miss
+West being so hardened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and firmness of
+her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which were almost straight
+and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her eyes were, a warm gray, and very
+steady and direct in expression, intelligent and alive. Perhaps, taking her
+face as a whole, the most noteworthy expression of it was a great calm. She
+seemed always in repose, at peace with herself and with the external world. The
+most beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows and
+hair. The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very straight,
+and just the slightest trifle too long. In this it was reminiscent of her
+father&rsquo;s nose. But the perfect modelling of the bridge and nostrils
+conveyed an indescribable advertisement of race and blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous
+mouth&mdash;generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but
+generous rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter. All the health and
+buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes. She rarely exposed
+her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed chiefly to employ her eyes;
+but when she laughed she showed strong white teeth, even, not babyish in their
+smallness, but just the firm, sensible, normal size one would expect in a woman
+as healthy and normal as she.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many of the
+factors that go to compose feminine beauty. She had all the beauty of
+colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was emphasized by the
+darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair. And, in the same way, the darkness of
+lashes and brows and the whiteness of skin set off the warm gray of her eyes.
+The forehead was, well, medium-broad and medium high, and quite smooth. No
+lines nor hints of lines were there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of
+depression and white nights of insomnia. Oh, she bore all the marks of the
+healthy, human female, who never worried nor was vexed in the spirit of her,
+and in whose body every process and function was frictionless and automatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet,&rdquo; I said to
+the mate. &ldquo;Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She ought to be,&rdquo; was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s reply as he lifted his
+glance across the smooth swell of sea to the sky. &ldquo;This ain&rsquo;t the
+first time she&rsquo;s been on the North Atlantic in winter.&rdquo; He debated
+a moment, as he studied the sea and sky. &ldquo;I should say, considering the
+high barometer, we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with
+the chances in favour of the calm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail as the
+<i>Elsinore</i> lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the trough
+with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in hollow thunder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The calm has it,&rdquo; Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness.
+&ldquo;And if this keeps up I&rsquo;ll be in my bunk in about five
+minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waved aside all sympathy. &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t bother about me, Mr.
+Pathurst. Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy
+weather, and poison ivy; besides, I&rsquo;d rather be sea-sick than have the
+hives.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or
+blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s raised voice. Like
+Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly
+unpleasant to the ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One, in
+particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark,&rdquo; I
+observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West&rsquo;s
+eyes to Mr. Pike&rsquo;s big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on
+the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. <i>She knew</i>.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<p>
+That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the table,
+while the <i>Elsinore</i> rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to her
+room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t see her for a couple of days,&rdquo; Captain West told
+me. &ldquo;Her mother was the same way&mdash;a born sailor, but always sick at
+the outset of a voyage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the shaking down.&rdquo; Mr. Pike astonished me with the
+longest observation I had yet heard him utter at table. &ldquo;Everybody has to
+shake down when they leave the land. We&rsquo;ve got to forget the good times
+on shore, and the good things money&rsquo;ll buy, and start watch and watch,
+four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are
+strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso and
+Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
+every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give it the
+go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t like the sea?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sighed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. But of course the sea is all I know&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Except music,&rdquo; I threw in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of
+the music I oughta have had coming to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve heard Schumann Heink?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wonderful, wonderful!&rdquo; he murmured fervently, then regarded me
+with an eager wistfulness. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve half-a-dozen of her records, and
+I&rsquo;ve got the second dog-watch below. If Captain West don&rsquo;t mind . .
+. &rdquo; (Captain West nodded that he didn&rsquo;t mind). &ldquo;And if
+you&rsquo;d want to hear them? The machine is a good one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this hoary
+old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of the sea that he
+was, carried in from his room a most splendid collection of phonograph records.
+These, and the machine, he placed on the table. The big doors were opened,
+making the dining-room and the main cabin into one large room. It was in the
+cabin that Captain West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran
+the phonograph. His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and
+every shade of expression was visible to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records were only of
+the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation. He handled each one
+reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping it and brushing it with a
+fine camel&rsquo;s hair brush while it revolved and ere he placed the needle on
+it. For a time all I could see was the huge brute hands of a brute-driver, with
+skin off the knuckles, that expressed love in their every movement. Each touch
+on the discs was a caress, and while the record played he hovered over it and
+dreamed in some heaven of music all his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face was
+expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I almost
+doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles, betrayed no sign
+of approbation or displeasure. He seemed preternaturally serene,
+preternaturally remote. And while I watched him I wondered what his duties
+were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of
+the ship. Not until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board. I had
+not seen him give an order. It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did
+the work. All Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully
+oblivious of the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> crew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Mr. Pike had played the &ldquo;Hallelujah Chorus&rdquo; from the
+<i>Messiah</i>, and &ldquo;He Shall Feed His Flock,&rdquo; he mentioned to me,
+almost apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason, perhaps,
+that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he had been a choir
+boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and sneaked
+off to sea again,&rdquo; he concluded with a harsh laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer&rsquo;s &ldquo;King
+of Heaven,&rdquo; and Mendelssohn&rsquo;s &ldquo;O Rest in the Lord.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all carefully
+wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he rolled a cigarette
+ere eight bells struck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got a lot more good things,&rdquo; he said confidentially:
+&ldquo;Coenen&rsquo;s &lsquo;Come Unto Me,&rsquo; and Faure&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Crucifix&rsquo;; and there&rsquo;s &lsquo;O Salutaris,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Lead, Kindly Light&rsquo; by the Trinity Choir; and &lsquo;Jesu, Lover
+of My Soul&rsquo; would just melt your heart. I&rsquo;ll play &rsquo;em for you
+some night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you believe in them?&rdquo; I was led to ask by his rapt expression
+and by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from my
+consciousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do . . . when I&rsquo;m listening to them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My sleep that night was wretched. Short of sleep from the previous night, I
+closed my book and turned my light off early. But scarcely had I dropped into
+slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my hives. All day they had
+not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the light and slept, the damnable
+persistent itching set up. Wada had not yet gone to bed, and from him I got
+more cream of tartar. It was useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard
+the watch changing, I partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and
+went up on to the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours&rsquo; watch, pacing up and down
+the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the wheel,
+whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the wheel-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and lofty,
+sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and experienced
+premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be possible, with such a
+crew, on the huge <i>Elsinore</i>, a cargo-carrier that was only a steel shell
+half an inch thick burdened with five thousand tons of coal? It was appalling
+to contemplate. The voyage had gone wrong from the first. In the wretched
+unbalance that loss of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only
+that the voyage was doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a
+madman could have dreamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no doubts
+but what she would always live. I thought of the killing and driving and
+music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had gone down on a last
+voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He was too neutral a being, too
+far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and
+passively exist in some Nirvana of his own creating.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and lying
+gibbering between the steel walls of the &rsquo;midship-house. This picture
+almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified the whole mad,
+helpless, idiotic crew. Certainly I could go back to Baltimore. Thank God I had
+the money to humour my whims. Had not Mr. Pike told me, in reply to a question,
+that he estimated the running expenses of the <i>Elsinore</i> at two hundred
+dollars a day? I could afford to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for
+the several days that might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot
+tug, or any inbound craft to Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to tell him
+my decision, when another presented itself: <i>Then are you</i>, <i>the thinker
+and philosopher</i>, <i>the world-sick one</i>, <i>afraid to go down</i>, <i>to
+cease in the darkness</i>? Bah! My own pride in my life-pridelessness saved
+Captain West&rsquo;s sleep from interruption. Of course I would go on with the
+adventure, if adventure it might be called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with
+a shipload of fools and lunatics&mdash;and worse; for I remembered the three
+Babylonish and Semitic ones who had aroused Mr. Pike&rsquo;s ire and who had
+laughed so terribly and silently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night thoughts! Sleepless thoughts! I dismissed them all and started below,
+chilled through by the cold. But at the chart-room door I encountered Mr.
+Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A pleasant evening, sir,&rdquo; he greeted me. &ldquo;A pity
+there&rsquo;s not a little wind to help us off the land.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think of the crew?&rdquo; I asked, after a moment or so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst. But I never
+saw one as queer as this&mdash;boys, old men, cripples and&mdash;you saw Tony
+the Greek go overboard yesterday? Well, that&rsquo;s only the beginning.
+He&rsquo;s a sample. I&rsquo;ve got a big Irishman in my watch who&rsquo;s
+going bad. Did you notice a little, dried-up Scotchman?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the evening
+before last?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very one&mdash;Andy Fay. Well, Andy Fay&rsquo;s just been
+complaining to me about O&rsquo;Sullivan. Says O&rsquo;Sullivan&rsquo;s
+threatened his life. When Andy Fay went off watch at eight he found
+O&rsquo;Sullivan stropping a razor. I&rsquo;ll give you the conversation as
+Andy gave it to me:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Says O&rsquo;Sullivan to me, &ldquo;Mr. Fay, I&rsquo;ll have a
+word wid yeh?&rdquo; &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; says I; &ldquo;what can I do for
+you?&rdquo; &ldquo;Sell me your sea-boots, Mr. Fay,&rdquo; says
+O&rsquo;Sullivan, polite as can be. &ldquo;But what will you be wantin&rsquo;
+of them?&rdquo; says I. &ldquo;&rsquo;Twill be a great favour,&rdquo; says
+O&rsquo;Sullivan. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s my only pair,&rdquo; says I; &ldquo;and
+you have a pair of your own,&rdquo; says I. &ldquo;Mr. Fay, I&rsquo;ll be
+needin&rsquo; me own in bad weather,&rdquo; says O&rsquo;Sullivan.
+&ldquo;Besides,&rdquo; says I, &ldquo;you have no money.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pay for them when we pay off in Seattle,&rdquo; says
+O&rsquo;Sullivan. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll not do it,&rdquo; says I; &ldquo;besides,
+you&rsquo;re not tellin&rsquo; me what you&rsquo;ll be doin&rsquo; with
+them.&rdquo; &ldquo;But I will tell yeh,&rdquo; says O&rsquo;Sullivan;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m wantin&rsquo; to throw &rsquo;em over the side.&rdquo; And
+with that I turns to walk away, but O&rsquo;Sullivan says, very polite and
+seducin&rsquo;-like, still a-stroppin&rsquo; the razor, &ldquo;Mr. Fay,&rdquo;
+says he, &ldquo;will you kindly step this way an&rsquo; have your throat
+cut?&rdquo; And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make
+report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or soon will be,&rdquo; I remarked. &ldquo;I noticed him yesterday, a
+big man muttering continually to himself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the man,&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you have many such at sea?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More than my share, I do believe, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement he pulled
+off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing match that I might
+see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald, but
+partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across this crown,
+disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the most prodigious scar
+I had ever seen. Because the vision of it was so fleeting, ere the match blew
+out, and because of the scar&rsquo;s very prodigiousness, I may possibly
+exaggerate, but I could have sworn that I could lay two fingers deep into the
+horrid cleft and that it was fully two fingers broad. There seemed no bone at
+all, just a great fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was confident
+that the brain pulsed immediately under that skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe. We were
+thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the time,
+running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his addled head that
+we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn&rsquo;t let him go ashore. I
+had my back to him at the time, and I never knew what struck me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?&rdquo; I
+questioned. &ldquo;There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you
+must have had wonderful vitality.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Molasses!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics. He
+always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk many weary
+weeks&mdash;we had a long passage&mdash;and by the time we reached Hong Kong
+the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was standing
+my third mate&rsquo;s watch&mdash;we carried third mates in those days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the
+<i>Elsinore</i>. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received the
+most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he would have
+been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed passenger with a
+proposition capable of going to the extent of buying the <i>Elsinore</i>
+outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed straight back to
+Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr. Mellaire should
+have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening, and of
+other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to infest the
+sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the manner of
+saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous, broad-minded, and, for a
+sailor, very much of a man of the world. It was easy for me to overlook his
+excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of social mannerism. It was not
+that. But all the time I was distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware,
+though in the darkness I couldn&rsquo;t even see his eyes, that there, behind
+those eyes, inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality that spied
+upon me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing while it thought
+another thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I had been
+talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature. The other half had
+not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick, behind the mask of
+words and flesh.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the heat of the
+bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet, whenever I ceased
+struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and read, my skin irritation
+decreased. But as soon as I turned out the lamp and closed my eyes I was
+troubled again. So hour after hour passed, through which, between vain attempts
+to sleep, I managed to wade through many pages of Rosny&rsquo;s <i>Le
+Termite</i>&mdash;a not very cheerful proceeding, I must say, concerned as it
+is with the microscopic and over-elaborate recital of No&euml;l
+Servaise&rsquo;s tortured nerves, bodily pains, and intellectual phantasma. At
+last I tossed the novel aside, damned all analytical Frenchmen, and found some
+measure of relief in the more genial and cynical Stendhal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down. At four the
+watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike&rsquo;s promenade.
+Half an hour later, just as the steward&rsquo;s alarm went off, instantly
+checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the <i>Elsinore</i> began to heel over
+on my side. I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling orders, and at times a
+trample and shuffle of many feet passed over my head as the weird crew pulled
+and hauled. The <i>Elsinore</i> continued to heel over until I could see the
+water against my port, and then she gathered way and dashed ahead at such a
+rate that I could hear the stinging and singing of the foam through the circle
+of thick glass beside me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after, when Wada
+served me breakfast and helped me dress. He, too, complained of inability to
+sleep. He had been bunked with Nancy in one of the rooms in the
+&rsquo;midship-house. Wada described the situation. The tiny room, made of
+steel, was air-tight when the steel door was closed. And Nancy insisted on
+keeping the door closed. As a result Wada, in the upper bunk, had stifled. He
+told me that the air had got so bad that the flame of the lamp, no matter how
+high it was turned, guttered down and all but refused to burn. Nancy snored
+beautifully through it all, while he had been unable to close his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is not clean,&rdquo; quoth Wada. &ldquo;He is a pig. No more will I
+sleep in that place.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the poop I found the <i>Elsinore</i>, with many of her sails furled,
+slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky. Also I found Mr.
+Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours before, and it took
+quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he had had the watch off between
+four and eight. Even then, he told me, he had slept from four until half-past
+seven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . . which
+means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that that alien
+thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible. Miss West did not
+appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the curse of sea-sickness
+had not been added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place for
+himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the corner with a
+solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain and a
+persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of water across the
+deck. With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which gave for&rsquo;ard along the
+main deck, I could see the wretched sailors, whenever they were given some task
+of pull and haul, wet through and through by the boarding seas. Several times I
+saw some of them taken off their feet and rolled about in the creaming foam.
+And yet, erect, unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among
+these rolled men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr. Pike or Mr.
+Mellaire. They were never taken off their feet. They never shrank away from a
+splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-falling water. They had fed on
+different food, were informed with a different spirit, were of iron in contrast
+with the poor miserables they drove to their bidding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in the
+cabin. Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I could have slept
+there for hours, for the hives did not trouble. Captain West, stretched out on
+the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet slippers, slept enviably. By some instinct,
+I might say, in the deep of sleep, he kept his place and was not rolled off
+upon the floor. Also, he lightly held a half-smoked cigar in one hand. I
+watched him for an hour, and knew him to be asleep, and marvelled that he
+maintained his easy posture and did not drop the cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After dinner there was no phonograph. The second dog-watch was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s
+on deck. Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too severe. It would make
+the needle jump and scratch his beloved records.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And no sleep! Another weary night of torment, and another dreary, overcast day
+and leaden, troubled sea. And no Miss West. Wada, too, is sea-sick, although
+heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend on me with glassy, unseeing eyes.
+I sent him to his bunk, and read through the endless hours until my eyes were
+tired, and my brain, between lack of sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West is no conversationalist. The more I see of him the more I am
+baffled. I have not yet found a reason for that first impression I received of
+him. He has all the poise and air of a remote and superior being, and yet I
+wonder if it be not poise and air and nothing else. Just as I had expected,
+that first meeting, ere he spoke a word, to hear fall from his lips words of
+untold beneficence and wisdom, and then heard him utter mere social
+commonplaces, so I now find myself almost forced to conclude that his touch of
+race, and beak of power, and all the tall, aristocratic slenderness of him have
+nothing behind them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that first
+impression. He has not shown any strength, but by the same token he has not
+shown any weakness. Sometimes I wonder what resides behind those clear blue
+eyes. Certainly I have failed to find any intellectual backing. I tried him out
+with William James&rsquo; <i>Varieties of Religious Experience</i>. He glanced
+at a few pages, then returned it to me with the frank statement that it did not
+interest him. He has no books of his own. Evidently he is not a reader. Then
+what is he? I dared to feel him out on politics. He listened courteously, said
+sometimes yes and sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very discouragement,
+said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still more aloof
+from his officers. I have not seen him address a further word to Mr. Mellaire
+than &ldquo;Good morning&rdquo; on the poop. As for Mr. Pike, who eats three
+times a day with him, scarcely any more conversation obtains between them. And
+I am surprised by what seems the very conspicuous awe with which Mr. Pike seems
+to regard his commander.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another thing. What are Captain West&rsquo;s duties? So far he has done
+nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day stroll a
+total of one mile around the poop. The mates do all the work, and hard work it
+is, four hours on deck and four below, day and night with never a variation. I
+watch Captain West and am amazed. He will loll back in the cabin and stare
+straight before him for hours at a time, until I am almost frantic to demand of
+him what are his thoughts. Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all. I give
+him up. I cannot fathom him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across the deck.
+I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with five thousand tons of
+coal around the Horn is more serious than I had thought. So deep is the
+<i>Elsinore</i> in the water that she is like a log awash. Her tall, six-foot
+bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas from boarding her. She has not the
+buoyancy one is accustomed to ascribe to ships. On the contrary, she is
+weighted down until she is dead, so that, for this one day alone, I am appalled
+at the thought of how many thousands of tons of the North Atlantic have boarded
+her and poured out through her spouting scuppers and clanging ports.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, a depressing day. The two mates have alternated on deck and in their
+bunks. Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the Bible. Miss West is
+still sea-sick. I have tired myself out with reading, and the fuzziness of my
+unsleeping brain makes for melancholy. Even Wada is anything but a cheering
+spectacle, crawling out of his bunk, as he does at stated intervals, and with
+sick, glassy eyes trying to discern what my needs may be. I almost wish I could
+get sea-sick myself. I had never dreamed that a sea voyage could be so
+unenlivening as this one is proving.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the <i>Elsinore</i>,
+under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from her
+scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic. And I have
+failed to sleep half-an-hour all told. At this rate, in a very short time I
+shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the ship. I never have had hives
+like these before. I can&rsquo;t understand it. So long as I keep my lamp
+burning and read I am untroubled. The instant I put out the lamp and drowse off
+the irritation starts and the lumps on my skin begin to form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West may be sea-sick, but she cannot be comatose, because at frequent
+intervals she sends the steward to me with more cream of tartar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have had a revelation to-day. I have discovered Captain West. He is a
+Samurai.&mdash;You remember the Samurai that H. G. Wells describes in his
+<i>Modern Utopia</i>&mdash;the superior breed of men who know things and are
+masters of life and of their fellow-men in a super-benevolent, super-wise way?
+Well, that is what Captain West is. Let me tell it to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had a shift of wind to-day. In the height of a south-west gale the wind
+shifted, in the instant, eight points, which is equivalent to a quarter of the
+circle. Imagine it! Imagine a gale howling from out of the south-west. And then
+imagine the wind, in a heavier and more violent gale, abruptly smiting you from
+the north-west. We had been sailing through a circular storm, Captain West
+vouchsafed to me, before the event, and the wind could be expected to box the
+compass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clad in sea-boots, oilskins and sou&rsquo;wester, I had for some time been
+hanging upon the rail at the break of the poop, staring down fascinated at the
+poor devils of sailors, repeatedly up to their necks in water, or submerged, or
+dashed like straws about the deck, while they pulled and hauled, stupidly,
+blindly, and in evident fear, under the orders of Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was with them, working them and working with them. He took every
+chance they took, yet somehow he escaped being washed off his feet, though
+several times I saw him entirely buried from view. There was more than luck in
+the matter; for I saw him, twice, at the head of a line of the men, himself
+next to the pin. And twice, in this position, I saw the North Atlantic curl
+over the rail and fall upon them. And each time he alone remained, holding the
+turn of the rope on the pin, while the rest of them were rolled and sprawled
+helplessly away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost it seemed to me good fun, as at a circus, watching their antics. But I
+did not apprehend the seriousness of the situation until, the wind screaming
+higher than ever and the sea a-smoke and white with wrath, two men did not get
+up from the deck. One was carried away for&rsquo;ard with a broken leg&mdash;it
+was Iare Jacobson, a dull-witted Scandinavian; and the other, Kid Twist, was
+carried away, unconscious, with a bleeding scalp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break,
+I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown
+away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving spindrift, and I had
+a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the time, slender, aristocratic, graceful in streaming oilskins, in
+apparent unconcern, giving no orders, effortlessly accommodating his body to
+the violent rolling of the <i>Elsinore</i>, Captain West strolled up and down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this stage in the gale that he unbent sufficiently to tell me that we
+were going through a circular storm and that the wind was boxing the compass. I
+did notice that he kept his gaze pretty steadily fixed on the overcast,
+cloud-driven sky. At last, when it seemed the wind could not possibly blow more
+fiercely, he found in the sky what he sought. It was then that I first heard
+his voice&mdash;a sea-voice, clear as a bell, distinct as silver, and of an
+ineffable sweetness and volume, as it might be the trump of Gabriel. That
+voice!&mdash;effortless, dominating! The mighty threat of the storm, made
+articulate by the resistance of the <i>Elsinore</i>, shouted in all the stays,
+bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and
+from the myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil&rsquo;s chorus of shrill
+pipings and screechings. And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain
+West&rsquo;s voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all
+music and mighty as an archangel&rsquo;s call to judgment. And it carried
+understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep
+in the wash of sea below us. And the man at the wheel obeyed, and Mr. Pike
+obeyed, barking and snarling orders to the poor wallowing devils who wallowed
+on and obeyed him in turn. And as the voice was the face. This face I had never
+seen before. It was the face of the spirit visitant, chaste with wisdom,
+lighted by a splendour of power and calm. Perhaps it was the calm that smote me
+most of all. It was as the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor
+sea-worn men with the word that all was well. It was not the face of the
+fighter. To my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all
+strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of the blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings of the
+storm, directing the gigantic, labouring <i>Elsinore</i> in all her intricate
+massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will, which was the will of
+wisdom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his creatures
+laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more slenderly tall and
+aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins, Captain West touched my
+shoulder and pointed astern over our weather quarter. I looked, and all that I
+could see was a vague smoke of sea and air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at
+the ocean&rsquo;s breast. And at the same moment the gale from the south-west
+ceased. There was no gale, no moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of
+air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt
+cessation of wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The shift,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There she comes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an atmospheric
+impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the <i>Elsinore</i> harp
+protest. It forced me down on the rail. I was like a windle-straw. As I faced
+this new abruptness of gale it drove the air back into my lungs, so that I
+suffocated and turned my head aside to breathe in the lee of the draught. The
+man at the wheel again listened to the Gabriel voice; and Mr. Pike, on the deck
+below, listened and repeated the will of the voice; and Captain West, in
+slender and stately balance, leaned into the face of the wind and slowly paced
+the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was magnificent. Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and the men
+who overlord the sea. Captain West had vindicated himself, exposited himself.
+At the height and crisis of storm he had taken charge of the <i>Elsinore</i>,
+and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was all he was, the foreman of a gang of
+men, the slave-driver of slaves, serving the one from beyond&mdash;the Samurai.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily into
+the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back against it, and
+then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on the knob of the
+chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the storm-white sea and
+wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and saw
+him. Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet slippers,
+rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather chair smoking
+dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing&mdash;or, if they saw,
+seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my ken. I have
+developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I know him less than
+the little I thought I knew him before.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this, which has
+become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the selectest and most
+mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor <i>Elsinore</i> pitches,
+plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts and all her
+five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing. To me she is the most
+erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on
+occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and that the <i>Elsinore</i> is
+well-loaded because he saw to it himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in order to
+watch her in her maddest antics. The sight is very pleasant to him, for his
+eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face and impart to it a
+hint of ecstasy. The <i>Elsinore</i> has a snug place in his heart, I am
+confident. He calls her behaviour admirable, and at such times will repeat to
+me that it was he who saw to her loading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on the
+sea, to the motion of the sea. There <i>is</i> a rhythm to this chaos of
+crossing, buffeting waves. I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve it. But
+Mr. Pike <i>knows</i> it. Again and again, as we paced up and down this
+afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he would seize
+my arm as I lost balance, and as the <i>Elsinore</i> smashed down on her side
+and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that seemed never to end, and
+that always ended with an abrupt, snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the
+corresponding roll to windward. In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike
+forecasts these antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously
+forecast them at all. He <i>feels</i> them; he knows them. They, and the sea,
+are ingrained in him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently shaking off
+a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw. If ever, in an hour, the
+<i>Elsinore</i> had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had not noticed
+it. So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next moment the
+<i>Elsinore</i> had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred feet of her
+starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the deck and smashed
+myself breathless against the wall of the chart-house. My ribs and one shoulder
+are sore from it yet. Now how did he know?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away. On the
+contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and again he
+lent his surplus to me. I begin to have more respect, not for the sea, but for
+the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of seamen that are as slaves on
+our decks, but for the real seamen who are their masters&mdash;for Captain
+West, for Mr. Pike, yes, and for Mr. Mellaire, dislike him as I do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back to the
+south-west. Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and reported the
+change to Captain West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst,&rdquo; the second mate told
+me when he came back. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find it an interesting
+manoeuvre.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why wait till four?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Captain&rsquo;s orders, sir. The watches will be changing, and
+we&rsquo;ll have the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the
+watch below by calling it out now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins, came out of
+the chart-house. Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took charge of the many men who,
+on deck and on the poop, were to manage the mizzen-braces, while Mr. Mellaire
+went for&rsquo;ard with his watch to handle the fore-and main-braces. It was a
+pretty manoeuvre, a play of leverages, by which they eased the force of the
+wind on the after part of the <i>Elsinore</i> and used the force of the wind on
+the for&rsquo;ard part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite oblivious
+of what was being done. He was again the favoured passenger, taking a stroll
+for his health&rsquo;s sake. And yet I knew that both his officers were
+uncomfortably aware of his presence and were keyed to their finest seamanship.
+I know, now, Captain West&rsquo;s position on board. He is the brains of the
+<i>Elsinore</i>. He is the master strategist. There is more in directing a ship
+on the ocean than in standing watches and ordering men to pull and haul. They
+are pawns, and the two officers are pieces, with which Captain West plays the
+game against sea, and wind, and season, and ocean current. He is the knower.
+They are his tongue, by which he makes his knowledge articulate.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A bad night&mdash;equally bad for the <i>Elsinore</i> and for me. She is
+receiving a sharp buffeting at the hands of the wintry North Atlantic. I fell
+asleep early, exhausted from lack of sleep, and awoke in an hour, frantic with
+my lumped and burning skin. More cream of tartar, more reading, more vain
+attempts to sleep, until shortly before five, when the steward brought me my
+coffee, I wrapped myself in my dressing-gown, and like a being distracted
+prowled into the cabin. I dozed in a leather chair and was thrown out by a
+violent roll of the ship. I tried the sofa, sinking to sleep immediately, and
+immediately thereafter finding myself precipitated to the floor. I am convinced
+that when Captain West naps on the sofa he is only half asleep. How else can he
+maintain so precarious a position?&mdash;unless, in him, too, the sea and its
+motion be ingrained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wandered into the dining-room, wedged myself into a screwed chair, and fell
+asleep, my head on my arms, my arms on the table. And at quarter past seven the
+steward roused me by shaking my shoulders. It was time to set table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heavy with the brief heaviness of sleep I had had, I dressed and stumbled up on
+to the poop in the hope that the wind would clear my brain. Mr. Pike had the
+watch, and with sure, age-lagging step he paced the deck. The man is a
+marvel&mdash;sixty-nine years old, a life of hardship, and as sturdy as a lion.
+Yet of the past night alone his hours had been: four to six in the afternoon on
+deck; eight to twelve on deck; and four to eight in the morning on deck. In a
+few minutes he would be relieved, but at midday he would again be on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I leaned on the poop-rail and stared for&rsquo;ard along the dreary waste of
+deck. Every port and scupper was working to ease the weight of North Atlantic
+that perpetually fell on board. Between the rush of the cascades, streaks of
+rust showed everywhere. Some sort of a wooden pin-rail had carried away on the
+starboard-rail at the foot of the mizzen-shrouds, and an amazing raffle of
+ropes and tackles washed about. Here Nancy and half-a-dozen men worked
+sporadically, and in fear of their lives, to clear the tangle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long-suffering bleakness was very pronounced on Nancy&rsquo;s face, and
+when the walls of water, in impending downfall, reared above the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> rail, he was always the first to leap for the life-line
+which had been stretched fore and aft across the wide space of deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest of the men were scarcely less backward in dropping their work and
+springing to safety&mdash;if safety it might be called, to grip a rope in both
+hands and have legs sweep out from under, and be wrenched full-length upon the
+boiling surface of an ice-cold flood. Small wonder they look wretched. Bad as
+their condition was when they came aboard at Baltimore, they look far worse
+now, what of the last several days of wet and freezing hardship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From time to time, completing his for&rsquo;ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike
+would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what
+happened to the poor devils below. The man&rsquo;s heart is callous. A thing of
+iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures
+who lack his own excessive iron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed the stone-deaf man, the twisted oaf whose face I have described as
+being that of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His bright, liquid,
+pain-filled eyes were more filled with pain than ever, his face still more lean
+and drawn with suffering. And yet his face showed an excess of nervousness,
+sensitiveness, and a pathetic eagerness to please and do. I could not help
+observing that, despite his dreadful sense-handicap and his wrecked, frail
+body, he did the most work, was always the last of the group to spring to the
+life-line and always the first to loose the life-line and slosh knee-deep or
+waist-deep through the churning water to attack the immense and depressing
+tangle of rope and tackle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remarked to Mr. Pike that the men seemed thinner and weaker than when they
+came on board, and he delayed replying for a moment while he stared down at
+them with that cattle-buyer&rsquo;s eye of his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure they are,&rdquo; he said disgustedly. &ldquo;A weak breed,
+that&rsquo;s what they are&mdash;nothing to build on, no stamina. The least
+thing drags them down. Why, in my day we grew fat on work like that&mdash;only
+we didn&rsquo;t; we worked so hard there wasn&rsquo;t any chance for fat. We
+kept in fighting trim, that was all. But as for this scum and slum&mdash;say,
+you remember, Mr. Pathurst, that man I spoke to the first day, who said his
+name was Charles Davis?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The one you thought there was something the matter with?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, and there was, too. He&rsquo;s in that &rsquo;midship room with the
+Greek now. He&rsquo;ll never do a tap of work the whole Voyage. He&rsquo;s a
+hospital case, if there ever was one. Talk about shot to pieces! He&rsquo;s got
+holes in him I could shove my fist through. I don&rsquo;t know whether
+they&rsquo;re perforating ulcers, or cancers, or cannon-shot wounds, or what
+not. And he had the nerve to tell me they showed up after he came on
+board!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And he had them all the time?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All the time! Take my word, Mr. Pathurst, they&rsquo;re years old. But
+he&rsquo;s a wonder. I watched him those first days, sent him aloft, had him
+down in the fore-hold trimming a few tons of coal, did everything to him, and
+he never showed a wince. Being up to the neck in the salt water finally fetched
+him, and now he&rsquo;s reported off duty&mdash;for the voyage. And he&rsquo;ll
+draw his wages for the whole time, have all night in, and never do a tap. Oh,
+he&rsquo;s a hot one to have passed over on us, and the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i>
+another man short.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Another!&rdquo; I exclaimed. &ldquo;Is the Greek going to die?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No fear. I&rsquo;ll have him steering in a few days. I refer to the
+misfits. If we rolled a dozen of them together they wouldn&rsquo;t make one
+real man. I&rsquo;m not saying it to alarm you, for there&rsquo;s nothing
+alarming about it; but we&rsquo;re going to have proper hell this
+voyage.&rdquo; He broke off to stare reflectively at his broken knuckles, as if
+estimating how much drive was left in them, then sighed and concluded,
+&ldquo;Well, I can see I&rsquo;ve got my work cut out for me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sympathizing with Mr. Pike is futile; the only effect is to make his mood
+blacker. I tried it, and he retaliated with:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You oughta see the bloke with curvature of the spine in Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s watch. He&rsquo;s a proper hobo, too, and a land lubber, and
+don&rsquo;t weigh more&rsquo;n a hundred pounds, and must be fifty years old,
+and he&rsquo;s got curvature of the spine, and he&rsquo;s able seaman, if you
+please, on the <i>Elsinore</i>. And worse than all that, he puts it over on
+you; he&rsquo;s nasty, he&rsquo;s mean, he&rsquo;s a viper, a wasp. He
+ain&rsquo;t afraid of anything because he knows you dassent hit him for fear of
+croaking him. Oh, he&rsquo;s a pearl of purest ray serene, if anybody should
+slide down a backstay and ask you. If you fail to identify him any other way,
+his name is Mulligan Jacobs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After breakfast, again on deck, in Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s watch, I discovered
+another efficient. He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular man of say
+forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big eagle-face, swarthy,
+with keen, intelligent black eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the best sailor
+in his watch, a proper seaman. When he referred to the man as the Maltese
+Cockney, and I asked why, he replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First, because he is Maltese, Mr. Pathurst; and next, because he talks
+Cockney like a native. And depend upon it, he heard Bow Bells before he lisped
+his first word.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And has O&rsquo;Sullivan bought Andy Fay&rsquo;s sea-boots yet?&rdquo; I
+queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this moment that Miss West emerged upon the poop. She was as rosy and
+vital as ever, and certainly, if she had been sea-sick, she flew no signals of
+it. As she came toward me, greeting me, I could not help remarking again the
+lithe and springy limb-movement with which she walked, and her fine, firm skin.
+Her neck, free in a sailor collar, with white sweater open at the throat,
+seemed almost redoubtably strong to my sleepless, jaundiced eyes. Her hair,
+under a white knitted cap, was smooth and well-groomed. In fact, the totality
+of impression she conveyed was of a well-groomedness one would not expect of a
+sea-captain&rsquo;s daughter, much less of a woman who had been sea-sick.
+Life!&mdash;that is the key of her, the essential note of her&mdash;life and
+health. I&rsquo;ll wager she has never entertained a morbid thought in that
+practical, balanced, sensible head of hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how have you been?&rdquo; she asked, then rattled on with sheer
+exuberance ere I could answer. &ldquo;Had a lovely night&rsquo;s sleep. I was
+really over my sickness yesterday, but I just devoted myself to resting up. I
+slept ten solid hours&mdash;what do you think of that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish I could say the same,&rdquo; I replied with appropriate
+dejection, as I swung in beside her, for she had evinced her intention of
+promenading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, then you&rsquo;ve been sick?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; I answered dryly. &ldquo;And I wish I had been.
+I haven&rsquo;t had five hours&rsquo; sleep all told since I came on board.
+These pestiferous hives. . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I held up a lumpy wrist to show. She took one glance at it, halted abruptly,
+and, neatly balancing herself to the roll, took my wrist in both her hands and
+gave it close scrutiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mercy!&rdquo; she cried; and then began to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was of two minds. Her laughter was delightful to the ear, there was such a
+mellowness, and healthiness, and frankness about it. On the other hand, that it
+should be directed at my misfortune was exasperating. I suppose my perplexity
+showed in my face, for when she had eased her laughter and looked at me with a
+sobering countenance, she immediately went off into more peals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You poor child,&rdquo; she gurgled at last. &ldquo;And when I think of
+all the cream of tartar I made you consume!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to take
+advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain just how many
+years she was my junior. She had told me she was twelve years old the time the
+<i>Dixie</i> collided with the river steamer in San Francisco Bay. Very well,
+all I had to do was to ascertain the date of that disaster and I had her. But
+in the meantime she laughed at me and my hives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose it is&mdash;er&mdash;humorous, in some sort of way,&rdquo; I
+said a bit stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss
+West, for it only set her off into more laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What you needed,&rdquo; she announced, with fresh gurglings, &ldquo;was
+an exterior treatment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tell me I&rsquo;ve got the chicken-pox or the
+measles,&rdquo; I protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo; She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another
+paroxysm. &ldquo;What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused deliberately, and looked me straight in the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of bedbugs,&rdquo; she concluded. And then, all seriousness and
+practicality, she went on: &ldquo;But we&rsquo;ll have that righted in a jiffy.
+I&rsquo;ll turn the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> after-quarters upside down, though
+I know there are none in father&rsquo;s room or mine. And though this is my
+first voyage with Mr. Pike I know he&rsquo;s too hard-bitten&rdquo; (here I
+laughed at her involuntary pun) &ldquo;an old sailor not to know that his room
+is clean. Yours&rdquo; (I was perturbed for fear she was going to say that I
+had brought them on board) &ldquo;have most probably drifted in from
+for&rsquo;ard. They always have them for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case.
+You&rsquo;d better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you. The next
+couple of nights you&rsquo;ll spend in the cabin or chart-room. And be sure
+Wada removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from your rooms.
+There&rsquo;s going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing out of woodwork,
+and rebuilding. Trust me. I know the vermin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Such a cleaning up and turning over! For two nights, one in the chart-room and
+one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep, and I am now almost
+stupid with excess of sleep. The land seems very far away. By some strange
+quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or months, have passed since I left
+Baltimore on that bitter March morning. And yet it was March 28, and this is
+only the first week in April.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West. She is the most
+capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered. What passed
+between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she was convinced
+that he was not the erring one. In some strange way, my two rooms are the only
+ones which have been invaded by this plague of vermin. Under Miss West&rsquo;s
+instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all superficial woodwork have been
+ripped out. She worked the carpenter from daylight till dark, and then, after a
+night of fumigation, two of the sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put
+the finishing touches on the cleansing operations. The carpenter is now busy
+rebuilding my rooms. Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days
+I expect to be settled back in my quarters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been four. Two
+of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to the work. The
+first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name, is an interesting
+fellow. I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West sent him packing and told
+Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea. How he happened to
+drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not explain, any more
+than did he explain how he came to ship on the <i>Elsinore</i>. But here he is,
+not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on the sea. He is a small man, but most
+powerfully built. His shoulders are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his
+shirt; and yet he is slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked. This
+last, however, is not due to sickness or ill-health. Tyro as he is on the sea,
+Steve Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked. He has a way of
+looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet it is at
+such moments I get most strongly the impression of crookedness. But he is a
+man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned with. In ways he suggests a
+kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a prejudice
+against&mdash;Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. And I have already
+noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve Roberts
+chums.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work for five
+minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature of the spine.
+But before she sent him packing other things occurred in which I was concerned.
+I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first came in to go to work, and I could
+not help observing the startled, avid glance he threw at my big shelves of
+books. He advanced on them in the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard
+of gold, and as a miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these
+book-titles with his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And such eyes! All the bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the man
+possessed was there in his eyes. They were small, pale-blue, and gimlet-pointed
+with fire. His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to ensanguine the bitter
+and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils. The man was constitutionally a hater,
+and I was not long in learning that he hated all things except books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would you care to read some of them?&rdquo; I said hospitably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head to look
+at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hell, ain&rsquo;t it?&mdash;you with a strong body and
+servants to carry for you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved
+spine that puts the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he uttered these
+words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the hall past my open door,
+gave me a very gratifying sense of safety. Being alone in the room with this
+man seemed much the same as if I were locked in a cage with a tiger-cat. The
+devilishness, the wickedness, and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with
+which the man eyed me and addressed me, were most unpleasant. I swear I knew
+fear&mdash;not calculated caution, not timid apprehension, but blind, panic,
+unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the creature was blood curdling; nor did
+it require words to convey it: it poured from him, out of his red-rimmed,
+blazing eyes, out of his withered, twisted, tortured face, out of his
+broken-nailed, crooked talons of hands. And yet, in that very moment of
+instinctive startle and repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one
+hand I could take the throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and
+throttle the malformed life out of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was little encouragement in such thought&mdash;no more than a man
+might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush them
+with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison into him.
+And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of him was the fear of being infected
+with his venom. I could not help it; for I caught a quick vision of the black
+and broken teeth I had seen in his mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me,
+eating me with their acid, destroying me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely, he did not
+know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads underfoot in
+nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a nightmare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You suffer pain often?&rdquo; I asked, attempting to get myself in hand
+by the calculated use of sympathy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an&rsquo;
+burn,&rdquo; was his reply. &ldquo;But by what damnable right do you have all
+these books, and time to read &rsquo;em, an&rsquo; all night in to read
+&rsquo;em, an&rsquo; soak in them, when me brain&rsquo;s on fire, and I&rsquo;m
+watch and watch, an&rsquo; me broken spine won&rsquo;t let me carry half a
+hundredweight of books about with me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to modify
+it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what were the books
+up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the writers he preferred.
+His library, he told me, among other things included, first and fore-most, a
+complete Byron. Next was a complete Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in
+one volume. A full hall dozen he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume
+of Lecky, Winwood Reade&rsquo;s <i>Martyrdom of Man</i>, several of Carlyle,
+and eight or ten of Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime
+favourite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently mad from
+any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him about books and
+bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He liked O. Henry. George Moore
+was a cad and a four&mdash;flusher. Edgar Saltus&rsquo; <i>Anatomy of
+Negation</i> was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a mystic frump. Emerson
+was a charlatan. Ibsen&rsquo;s <i>Ghosts</i> was the stuff, though Ibsen was a
+bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He preferred Flaubert to de
+Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian
+boiling. John Masefield knew what he was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was
+living too fat to turn out the stuff he first turned out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had ever
+heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology. Yes, he was a
+Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist. On the other hand,
+political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism and quietism. Political
+socialism had gone to pot, while industrial unionism was the logical
+culmination of Marxism. He was a direct actionist. The mass strike was the
+thing. Sabotage, not merely as a withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen
+destruction-of-profits policy, was the weapon. Of course he believed in the
+propaganda of the deed, but a man was a fool to talk about it. His job was to
+do it and keep his mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence.
+Of course, <i>he</i> talked; but what of it? Didn&rsquo;t he have curvature of
+the spine? He didn&rsquo;t care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried
+to give it to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he talked about
+and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was patent that he
+was self-educated. When I asked him how it was he had come to sea, he replied
+that the hooks in his brain were as hot one place as another. He unbent enough
+to tell me that he had been an athlete, when he was a young man, a professional
+foot-racer in Eastern Canada. And then his disease had come upon him, and for a
+quarter of a century he had been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of
+a personal acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any man
+that ever existed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
+doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour look of
+disapprobation. Mr. Pike&rsquo;s countenance is almost petrified. Any
+expression seems to crack it&mdash;with the exception of sourness. But when Mr.
+Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His hard-skinned,
+hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he condemned my consuming
+Mulligan Jacobs&rsquo;s time. To Mulligan Jacobs he said in his customary
+snarl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on an&rsquo; get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch
+below.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I had already
+seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was manifested. I had a
+feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather, did I touch his face it
+would crackle electric sparks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aw, go to hell, you old stiff,&rdquo; said Mulligan Jacobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If ever I had seen murder in a man&rsquo;s eyes, I saw it then in the
+mate&rsquo;s. He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not
+open but clenched. One stroke of that bear&rsquo;s paw and Mulligan Jacobs and
+all the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
+darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake on the
+trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant. More than
+that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted neck to meet the blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that frail,
+crippled, repulsive thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s me that can call you the stiff,&rdquo; said Mulligan Jacobs.
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t no Larry. G&rsquo;wan an&rsquo; hit me. Why don&rsquo;t
+you hit me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose whole career on
+the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, could not strike this
+fractured splinter of a man. I swear that Mr. Pike actually struggled with
+himself to strike. I saw it. But he could not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on to your work,&rdquo; he ordered. &ldquo;The voyage is young yet,
+Mulligan. I&rsquo;ll have you eatin&rsquo; outa my hand before it&rsquo;s
+over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Mulligan Jacobs&rsquo;s face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
+neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting into
+incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that consumed him
+that he could find no words to clothe it. All he could do was to hawk and
+guttural deep in his throat until I should not have been surprised had he spat
+poison in the mate&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely beaten.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I can&rsquo;t get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the cripple
+facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is different from the
+books and from what I know of existence. It is revelation. Life is a profoundly
+amazing thing. What is this bitter flame that informs Mulligan Jacobs? How dare
+he&mdash;with no hope of any profit, not a hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope
+nor a martyr to God, but a mere filthy, malignant rat&mdash;how dare he, I ask
+myself, be so defiant, so death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt
+all the schools of the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg
+to stand on that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil
+of philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan Jacobs .
+. . unless he be insane. And then I don&rsquo;t know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans with
+whom I am herded on the <i>Elsinore</i>?
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is another one of
+them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon. He is the pallid,
+furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the men were routed out of
+the forecastle to man the windlass&mdash;the man I so instantly adjudged a
+drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;White slaver,&rdquo; was his answer. &ldquo;Had to skin outa New York to
+save his skin. He&rsquo;ll be consorting with those other three larrakins I
+gave a piece of my mind to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what do you make of them?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A month&rsquo;s wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or
+a committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin&rsquo; for
+&rsquo;em right now. I&rsquo;d like to have the cash somebody&rsquo;s put up in
+New York to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gangsters?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what. But I&rsquo;ll trim their dirty hides. I&rsquo;ll
+trim &rsquo;em. Mr. Pathurst, this voyage ain&rsquo;t started yet, and this old
+stiff&rsquo;s a long way from his last legs. I&rsquo;ll give them a run for
+their money. Why, I&rsquo;ve buried better men than the best of them aboard
+this craft. And I&rsquo;ll bury some of them that think me an old stiff.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pathurst, I&rsquo;ve heard you&rsquo;re a writing man. And when they
+told me at the agents&rsquo; you were going along passenger, I made a point of
+going to see your play. Now I&rsquo;m not saying anything about that play, one
+way or the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man
+you&rsquo;ll get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell&rsquo;s
+going to pop, believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that&rsquo;ll
+do a lot of the poppin&rsquo;. Some several and plenty&rsquo;s going to learn
+who&rsquo;s an old stiff.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is
+delicious&mdash;thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr. Pike,
+both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then there was Wada. But
+no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate the problem of woman. It is just
+such an incident among a million others that keeps the thinker&rsquo;s gaze
+fixed on woman. They truly are the mothers and the conservers of the race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rail as I will at Miss West&rsquo;s red-blood complacency of life, yet I must
+bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible, hard-headed, a
+comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing attributes of
+the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must confess I am most
+grateful that she is along. Had she not been on the <i>Elsinore</i>, by this
+time I should have been so overwrought from lack of sleep that I would be
+biting my veins and howling&mdash;as mad a hatter as any of our cargo of mad
+hatters. And so we come to it&mdash;the everlasting mystery of woman. One may
+not be able to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one
+cannot get along without her. But, regarding Miss West, I do entertain one
+fervent hope, namely, that she is not a suffragette. That would be too much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a bit
+fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he regretted the
+plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms. It seems he has a keen sense of
+hospitality, and that he is my host on the <i>Elsinore</i>, and that, although
+he is oblivious of the existence of the crew, he is not oblivious of my
+comfort. By his few expressions of regret it appears that he cannot forgive
+himself for his careless acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my
+affliction. Yes; Captain West is a real human man. Is he not the father of the
+slender-faced, strapping-bodied Miss West?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank goodness that&rsquo;s settled,&rdquo; was Miss West&rsquo;s
+exclamation this morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how
+gloriously I had slept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all practical
+purposes&mdash;it was settled, she next said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on and see the chickens.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the
+&rsquo;midship-house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat hens in
+the ship&rsquo;s chicken-coop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait of hers
+as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming down on the tug
+from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor require to be
+entertained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Come and see the chickens</i>!&mdash;Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of
+that simple invitation! For effrontery of possessiveness is there anything that
+can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female, human
+woman?&mdash;<i>Come and see the chickens</i>! Oh, well, the sailors
+for&rsquo;ard may be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here, aft,
+is one male passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an equally
+hard-bitten adventurer on the sea of matrimony. When I go over the census I
+remember at least several women, superior to Miss West, who trilled their song
+of sex and failed to shipwreck me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of the sea has
+stolen into my mental processes. Involuntarily I think in terms of the sea.
+Another thing I notice is my excessive use of superlatives. But then,
+everything on board the <i>Elsinore</i> is superlative. I find myself
+continually combing my vocabulary in quest of just and adequate words. Yet am I
+aware of failure. For example, all the words of all the dictionaries would fail
+to approximate the exceeding terribleness of Mulligan Jacobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return to the chickens. Despite every precaution, it was evident that
+they had had a hard time during the past days of storm. It was equally evident
+that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness, had not neglected them. Under her
+directions the steward had actually installed a small oil-stove in the big
+coop, and she now beckoned him up to the top of the house as he was passing
+for&rsquo;ard to the galley. It was for the purpose of instructing him further
+in the matter of feeding them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where were the grits? They needed grits. He didn&rsquo;t know. The sack had
+been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had promised a couple of
+sailors that afternoon to overhaul the lazarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Plenty of ashes,&rdquo; she told the steward. &ldquo;Remember. And if a
+sailor doesn&rsquo;t clean the coop each day, you report to me. And give them
+only clean food&mdash;no spoiled scraps, mind. How many eggs yesterday?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward&rsquo;s eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got nine
+the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The poor things,&rdquo; said Miss West&mdash;to me. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve
+no idea how bad weather reduces their laying.&rdquo; She turned back upon the
+steward. &ldquo;Mind now, you watch and find out which hens don&rsquo;t lay,
+and kill them first. And you ask me each time before you kill one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while Miss West
+talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler. But it gave me opportunity to
+observe her. It is the length of her eyes that accentuates their steadiness of
+gaze&mdash;helped, of course, by the dark brows and lashes. I noted again the
+warm gray of her eyes. And I began to identify her, to locate her. She is a
+physical type of the best of the womanhood of old New England. Nothing spare
+nor meagre, nor bred out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one
+would call robust. When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred. I must fall
+back on my other word, which will have to be the last: Miss West is
+vital-bodied. That is the key-word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I ventured my
+customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And has O&rsquo;Sullivan bought Andy Fay&rsquo;s sea-boots yet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not yet, Mr. Pathurst,&rdquo; was the reply, &ldquo;though he nearly got
+them early this morning. Come on along, sir, and I&rsquo;ll show you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along the
+bridge, across the &rsquo;midship-house and the for&rsquo;ard-house. From the
+edge of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two Japanese, with
+sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed bundle that unmistakably
+contained a human body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;O&rsquo;Sullivan used a razor,&rdquo; said Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that is Andy Fay?&rdquo; I cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir, not Andy. That&rsquo;s a Dutchman. Christian Jespersen was his
+name on the articles. He got in O&rsquo;Sullivan&rsquo;s way when
+O&rsquo;Sullivan went after the boots. That&rsquo;s what saved Andy. Andy was
+more active. Jespersen couldn&rsquo;t get out of his own way, much less out of
+O&rsquo;Sullivan&rsquo;s. There&rsquo;s Andy sitting over there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
+Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe. One arm was in a sling
+and his head was bandaged. Beside him squatted Mulligan Jacobs. They were a
+pair. Both were blue-eyed, and both were malevolent-eyed. And they were equally
+emaciated. It was easy to see that they had discovered early in the voyage
+their kinship of bitterness. Andy Fay, I knew, was sixty-three years old,
+although he looked a hundred; and Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty,
+made up for the difference by the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in his
+face and eyes. I wondered if he sat beside the injured bitter one in some sense
+of sympathy, or if he were there in order to gloat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
+inevitable clown-grin. One hand was swathed in bandages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must have kept Mr. Pike busy,&rdquo; was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till
+eight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Are there any more?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One more, sir, a sheeny. I didn&rsquo;t know his name before, but Mr.
+Pike got it&mdash;Isaac B. Chantz. I never saw in all my life at sea as many
+sheenies as are on board the <i>Elsinore</i> right now. Sheenies don&rsquo;t
+take to the sea as a rule. We&rsquo;ve certainly got more than our share of
+them. Chantz isn&rsquo;t badly hurt, but you ought to hear him whimper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s O&rsquo;Sullivan?&rdquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the &rsquo;midship-house with Davis, and without a mark. Mr. Pike got
+into the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw. And now he&rsquo;s
+lashed down and talking in a trance. He&rsquo;s thrown the fear of God into
+Davis. Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike, threatening to
+brain O&rsquo;Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and complaining that
+it&rsquo;s no way to run a hospital. He&rsquo;d have padded cells,
+straitjackets, night and day nurses, and violent wards, I suppose&mdash;and a
+convalescents&rsquo; home in a Queen Anne cottage on the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh dear, oh dear,&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire sighed. &ldquo;This is the
+funniest voyage and the funniest crew I&rsquo;ve ever tackled. It&rsquo;s not
+going to come to a good end. Anybody can see that with half an eye. It&rsquo;ll
+be dead of winter off the Horn, and a fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;le full of
+lunatics and cripples to do the work.&mdash;Just take a look at that one. Crazy
+as a bedbug. He&rsquo;s likely to go overboard any time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung overboard
+the first day. He had just come around the corner of the house, and, beyond one
+arm in a sling, seemed in good condition. He walked easily and with strength, a
+testimonial to the virtues of Mr. Pike&rsquo;s rough surgery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian Jespersen, and
+to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor&rsquo;s shroud. One of
+them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton and bandage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did he get hurt, too?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir. He&rsquo;s the sail-maker. They&rsquo;re both sail-makers.
+He&rsquo;s a good one, too. Yatsuda is his name. But he&rsquo;s just had
+blood-poisoning and lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months. He flatly
+refused to let them amputate. He&rsquo;s all right now, but the hand is dead,
+all except the thumb and fore-finger, and he&rsquo;s teaching himself to sew
+with his left hand. He&rsquo;s as clever a sail-maker as you&rsquo;ll find at
+sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination,&rdquo; I remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s put five men out of commission,&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire sighed.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s O&rsquo;Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone,
+and Andy Fay, and Shorty, and the sheeny. And the voyage not started yet. And
+there&rsquo;s Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps&mdash;why,
+sir, we&rsquo;ll soon be that weak it&rsquo;ll take both watches to set a
+staysail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr. Mellaire, I was
+shocked&mdash;no; not because death was aboard with us. I have stood by my
+philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or by murder. What affected
+me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the affair. Even murder&mdash;murder for
+cause&mdash;I can understand. It is comprehensible that men should kill one
+another in the passion of love, of hatred, of patriotism, of religion. But this
+was different. Here was killing without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a
+thing monstrously irrational.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the open door of
+the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O&rsquo;Sullivan, and peeped in.
+There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower bunk, rolling his eyes and
+raving. In the top bunk, directly above, lay Charles Davis, calmly smoking a
+pipe. I looked for the marlin-spike. There it was, ready to hand, on the
+bedding beside him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s hell, ain&rsquo;t it, sir?&rdquo; was his greeting.
+&ldquo;And how am I goin&rsquo; to get any sleep with that baboon chattering
+away there. He never lets up&mdash;keeps his chin-music goin&rsquo; right along
+when he&rsquo;s asleep, only worse. The way he grits his teeth is something
+awful. Now I leave it to you, sir, is it right to put a crazy like that in with
+a sick man? And I am a sick man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and halted just
+out of sight of the man in the bunk. And the man talked on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk. It hurts me to crawl up here.
+It&rsquo;s inhumanity, that&rsquo;s what it is, and sailors at sea are better
+protected by the law than they used to be. And I&rsquo;ll have you for a
+witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike stepped into the doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up, you damned sea-lawyer, you,&rdquo; he snarled.
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you played a dirty trick enough comin&rsquo; on board this
+ship in your condition? And if I have anything more out of you . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was so angry that he could not complete the threat. After spluttering
+for a moment he made a fresh attempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You . . . you . . . well, you annoy me, that&rsquo;s what you do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know the law, sir,&rdquo; Davis answered promptly. &ldquo;I worked
+full able seaman on this here ship. All hands can testify to that. I was aloft
+from the start. Yes, sir, and up to my neck in salt water day and night. And
+you had me below trimmin&rsquo; coal. I did full duty and more, until this
+sickness got me&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were petrified and rotten before you ever saw this ship,&rdquo; Mr.
+Pike broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The court&rsquo;ll decide that, sir,&rdquo; replied the imperturbable
+Davis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if you go to shoutin&rsquo; off your sea-lawyer mouth,&rdquo; Mr.
+Pike continued, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll jerk you out of that and show you what real
+work is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; lay the owners open for lovely damages when we get in,&rdquo;
+Davis sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not if I bury you before we get in,&rdquo; was the mate&rsquo;s quick,
+grim retort. &ldquo;And let me tell you, Davis, you ain&rsquo;t the first
+sea-lawyer I&rsquo;ve dropped over the side with a sack of coal to his
+feet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike turned, with a final &ldquo;Damned sea-lawyer!&rdquo; and started
+along the deck. I was walking behind him when he stopped abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pathurst.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not as an officer to a passenger did he thus address me. His tone was
+imperative, and I gave heed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pathurst. From now on the less you see aboard this ship the better.
+That is all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And again he turned on his heel and went his way.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+No, the sea is not a gentle place. It must be the very hardness of the life
+that makes all sea-people hard. Of course, Captain West is unaware that his
+crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never address the men save to give
+commands. But Miss West, who is more like myself, a passenger, ignores the men.
+She does not even say good-morning to the man at the wheel when she first comes
+on deck. Nevertheless I shall, at least to the man at the wheel. Am I not a
+passenger?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which reminds me. Technically I am not a passenger. The <i>Elsinore</i> has no
+licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as third mate and am
+supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month. Wada is down as cabin boy,
+although I paid a good price for his passage and he is my servant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead. Within an hour after I
+had watched the sail-makers at work Christian Jespersen was slid overboard,
+feet first, a sack of coal to his feet to sink him. It was a mild, calm day,
+and the <i>Elsinore</i>, logging a lazy two knots, was not hove to for the
+occasion. At the last moment Captain West came for&rsquo;ard, prayer-book in
+hand, read the brief service for burial at sea, and returned immediately aft.
+It was the first time I had seen him for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall not bother to describe the burial. All I shall say of it is that it was
+as sordid as Christian Jespersen&rsquo;s life had been and as his death had
+been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Miss West, she sat in a deck-chair on the poop busily engaged with some
+sort of fancy work. When Christian Jespersen and his coal splashed into the sea
+the crew immediately dispersed, the watch below going to its bunks, the watch
+on deck to its work. Not a minute elapsed ere Mr. Mellaire was giving orders
+and the men were pulling and hauling. So I returned to the poop to be
+unpleasantly impressed by Miss West&rsquo;s smiling unconcern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, he&rsquo;s buried,&rdquo; I observed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she said, with all the tonelessness of disinterest, and went
+on with her stitching.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She must have sensed my frame of mind, for, after a moment, she paused from her
+sewing and looked at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your first sea funeral, Mr. Pathurst?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Death at sea does not seem to affect you,&rdquo; I said bluntly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not any more than on the land.&rdquo; She shrugged her shoulders.
+&ldquo;So many people die, you know. And when they are strangers to you . . .
+well, what do you do on the land when you learn that some workers have been
+killed in a factory you pass every day coming to town? It is the same on the
+sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s too bad we are a hand short,&rdquo; I said deliberately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It did not miss her. Just as deliberately she replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, isn&rsquo;t it? And so early in the voyage, too.&rdquo; She looked
+at me, and when I could not forbear a smile of appreciation she smiled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I know very well, Mr. Pathurst, that you think me a heartless
+wretch. But it isn&rsquo;t that it&rsquo;s . . . it&rsquo;s the sea, I suppose.
+And yet, I didn&rsquo;t know this man. I don&rsquo;t remember ever having seen
+him. At this stage of the voyage I doubt if I could pick out half-a-dozen of
+the sailors as men I had ever laid eyes on. So why vex myself with even
+thinking of this stupid stranger who was killed by another stupid stranger? As
+well might one die of grief with reading the murder columns of the daily
+papers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet, it seems somehow different,&rdquo; I contended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;ll get used to it,&rdquo; she assured me cheerfully, and
+returned to her sewing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I asked her if she had read Moody&rsquo;s <i>Ship of Souls</i>, but she had
+not. I searched her out further. She liked Browning, and was especially fond of
+<i>The Ring and the Book</i>. This was the key to her. She cared only for
+healthful literature&mdash;for the literature that exposits the vital lies of
+life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For instance, the mention of Schopenhauer produced smiles and laughter. To her
+all the philosophers of pessimism were laughable. The red blood of her would
+not permit her to take them seriously. I tried her out with a conversation I
+had had with De Casseres shortly before leaving New York. De Casseres, after
+tracing Jules de Gaultier&rsquo;s philosophic genealogy back to Schopenhauer
+and Nietzsche, had concluded with the proposition that out of their two
+formulas de Gaultier had constructed an even profounder formula. The
+&ldquo;Will-to-Live&rdquo; of the one and the &ldquo;Will-to-Power&rdquo; of
+the other were, after all, only parts of de Gaultier&rsquo;s supreme
+generalization, the &ldquo;Will-to-Illusion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I flatter myself that even De Casseres would have been pleased with the way I
+repeated his argument. And when I had concluded it, Miss West promptly demanded
+if the realists might not be fooled by their own phrases as often and as
+completely as were the poor common mortals with the vital lies they never
+questioned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there we were. An ordinary young woman, who had never vexed her brains with
+ultimate problems, hears such things stated for the first time, and
+immediately, and with a laugh, sweeps them all away. I doubt not that De
+Casseres would have agreed with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you believe in God?&rdquo; I asked rather abruptly. She dropped her
+sewing into her lap, looked at me meditatively, then gazed on and away across
+the flashing sea and up into the azure dome of sky. And finally, with true
+feminine evasion, she replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My father does.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you?&rdquo; I insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know. I don&rsquo;t bother my head about such
+things. I used to when I was a little girl. And yet . . . yes, surely I believe
+in God. At times, when I am not thinking about it at all, I am very sure, and
+my faith that all is well is just as strong as the faith of your Jewish friend
+in the phrases of the philosophers. That&rsquo;s all it comes to, I suppose, in
+every case&mdash;faith. But, as I say, why bother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, I have you now, Miss West!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;You are a true
+daughter of Herodias.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t sound nice,&rdquo; she said with a <i>moue</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it isn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I exulted. &ldquo;Nevertheless, it is what
+you are. It is Arthur Symon&rsquo;s poem, <i>The Daughters of Herodias</i>.
+Some day I shall read it to you, and you will answer. I know you will answer
+that you, too, have looked often upon the stars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had just got upon the subject of music, of which she possesses a
+surprisingly solid knowledge, and she was telling me that Debussy and his
+school held no particular charm for her, when Possum set up a wild yelping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The puppy had strayed for&rsquo;ard along the bridge to the
+&rsquo;midship-house, and had evidently been investigating the chickens when
+his disaster came upon him. So shrill was his terror that we both stood up. He
+was dashing along the bridge toward us at full speed, yelping at every jump and
+continually turning his head back in the direction whence he came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spoke to him and held out my hand, and was rewarded with a snap and clash of
+teeth as he scuttled past. Still with head turned back, he went on along the
+poop. Before I could apprehend his danger, Mr. Pike and Miss West were after
+him. The mate was the nearer, and with a magnificent leap gained the rail just
+in time to intercept Possum, who was blindly going overboard under the slender
+railing. With a sort of scooping kick Mr. Pike sent the animal rolling half
+across the poop. Howling and snapping more violently, Possum regained his feet
+and staggered on toward the opposite railing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t touch him!&rdquo; Mr. Pike cried, as Miss West showed her
+intention of catching the crazed little animal with her hands.
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t touch&rsquo;m! He&rsquo;s got a fit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it did not deter her. He was half-way under the railing when she caught him
+up and held him at arm&rsquo;s length while he howled and barked and slavered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a fit,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike, as the terrier collapsed and lay
+on the deck jerking convulsively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps a chicken pecked him,&rdquo; said Miss West. &ldquo;At any rate,
+get a bucket of water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better let me take him,&rdquo; I volunteered helplessly, for I was
+unfamiliar with fits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take
+charge of him. The cold water is what he needs. He got too close to the coop,
+and a peck on the nose frightened him into the fit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First time I ever heard of a fit coming that way,&rdquo; Mr. Pike
+remarked, as he poured water over the puppy under Miss West&rsquo;s direction.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just a plain puppy fit. They all get them at sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it was the sails that caused it,&rdquo; I argued.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve noticed that he is very afraid of them. When they flap, he
+crouches down in terror and starts to run. You noticed how he ran with his head
+turned back?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen dogs with fits do that when there was nothing to
+frighten them,&rdquo; Mr. Pike contended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a fit, no matter what caused it,&rdquo; Miss West stated
+conclusively. &ldquo;Which means that he has not been fed properly. From now on
+I shall feed him. You tell your boy that, Mr. Pathurst. Nobody is to feed
+Possum anything without my permission.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this juncture Wada arrived with Possum&rsquo;s little sleeping box, and they
+prepared to take him below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was splendid of you, Miss West,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and rash, as
+well, and I won&rsquo;t attempt to thank you. But I tell you what-you take him.
+He&rsquo;s your dog now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed and shook her head as I opened the chart-house door for her to
+pass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; but I&rsquo;ll take care of him for you. Now don&rsquo;t bother to
+come below. This is my affair, and you would only be in the way. Wada will help
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I was rather surprised, as I returned to my deck chair and sat down, to
+find how affected I was by the little episode. I remembered, at the first, that
+my pulse had been distinctly accelerated with the excitement of what had taken
+place. And somehow, as I leaned back in my chair and lighted a cigarette, the
+strangeness of the whole voyage vividly came to me. Miss West and I talk
+philosophy and art on the poop of a stately ship in a circle of flashing sea,
+while Captain West dreams of his far home, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire stand
+watch and watch and snarl orders, and the slaves of men pull and haul, and
+Possum has fits, and Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs burn with hatred
+unconsumable, and the small-handed half-caste Chinese cooks for all, and Sundry
+Buyers perpetually presses his abdomen, and O&rsquo;Sullivan raves in the steel
+cell of the &rsquo;midship-house, and Charles Davis lies about him nursing a
+marlin-spike, and Christian Jespersen, miles astern, is deep sunk in the sea
+with a sack of coal at his feet.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Two weeks out to-day, on a balmy sea, under a cloud-flecked sky, and slipping
+an easy eight knots through the water to a light easterly wind. Captain West
+said he was almost convinced that it was the north-east trade. Also, I have
+learned that the <i>Elsinore</i>, in order to avoid being jammed down on Cape
+San Roque, on the Brazil coast, must first fight eastward almost to the coast
+of Africa. On occasion, on this traverse, the Cape Verde Islands are raised. No
+wonder the voyage from Baltimore to Seattle is reckoned at eighteen thousand
+miles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found Tony, the suicidal Greek, steering this morning when I came on deck. He
+seemed sensible enough, and quite rationally took off his hat when I said good
+morning to him. The sick men are improving nicely, with the exceptions of
+Charles Davis and O&rsquo;Sullivan. The latter still is lashed to his bunk, and
+Mr. Pike has compelled Davis to attend on him. As a result, Davis moves about
+the deck, bringing food and water from the galley and grumbling his wrongs to
+every member of the crew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wada told me a strange thing this morning. It seems that he, the steward, and
+the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the cook&rsquo;s room&mdash;all
+being Asiatics&mdash;where they talk over ship&rsquo;s gossip. They seem to
+miss little, and Wada brings it all to me. The thing Wada told me was the
+curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire. They have sat in judgment on him and they do
+not approve of his intimacy with the three gangsters for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, Wada,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;he is not that kind of a man. He is
+very hard and rough with all the sailors. He treats them like dogs. You know
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; assented Wada. &ldquo;Other sailors he do that. But those
+three very bad men he make good friends. Louis say second mate belong aft like
+first mate and captain. No good for second mate talk like friend with sailors.
+No good for ship. Bime by trouble. You see. Louis say Mr. Mellaire crazy do
+that kind funny business.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which, if it were true, and I saw no reason to doubt it, led me to
+inquire. It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine,
+have made themselves cocks of the forecastle. Standing together, they have
+established a reign of terror and are ruling the forecastle. All their training
+in New York in ruling the slum brutes and weaklings in their gangs fits them
+for the part. As near as I could make out from Wada&rsquo;s tale, they first
+began on the two Italians in their watch, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. By
+means I cannot guess, they have reduced these two wretches to trembling slaves.
+As an instance, the other night, according to the ship&rsquo;s gossip, Bert
+Rhine made Bombini get out of bed and fetch him a drink of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Isaac Chantz is likewise under their rule, though he is treated more kindly.
+Herman Lunkenheimer, a good-natured but simple-minded dolt of a German,
+received a severe beating from the three because he refused to wash some of
+Nosey Murphy&rsquo;s dirty garments. The two bosuns are in fear of their lives
+with this clique, which is growing; for Steve Roberts, the ex-cowboy, and the
+white-slaver, Arthur Deacon, have been admitted to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am the only one aft who possesses this information, and I confess I
+don&rsquo;t know what to do with it. I know that Mr. Pike would tell me to mind
+my own business. Mr. Mellaire is out of the question. And Captain West
+hasn&rsquo;t any crew. And I fear Miss West would laugh at me for my pains.
+Besides, I understand that every forecastle has its bully, or group of bullies;
+so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern of the afterguard. The
+ship&rsquo;s work goes on. The only effect I can conjecture is an increase in
+the woes of the unfortunates who must bow to this petty tyranny for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&mdash;Oh, and another thing Wada told me. The gangster clique has established
+its privilege of taking first cut of the salt-beef in the meat-kids. After
+that, the rest take the rejected pieces. But I will say, contrary to my
+expectations, the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> forecastle is well found. The men are
+not on whack. They have all they want to eat. A barrel of good hardtack stands
+always open in the forecastle. Louis bakes fresh bread for the sailors three
+times a week. The variety of food is excellent, if not the quality. There is no
+restriction in the amount of water for drinking purposes. And I can only say
+that in this good weather the men&rsquo;s appearance improves daily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Possum is very sick. Each day he grows thinner. Scarcely can I call him a
+perambulating skeleton, because he is too weak to walk. Each day, in this
+delightful weather, Wada, under Miss West&rsquo;s instructions, brings him up
+in his box and places him out of the wind on the awninged poop. She has taken
+full charge of the puppy, and has him sleep in her room each night. I found her
+yesterday, in the chart-room, reading up the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> medical
+library. Later on she overhauled the medicine-chest. She is essentially the
+life-giving, life-conserving female of the species. All her ways, for herself
+and for others, make toward life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet&mdash;and this is so curious it gives me pause&mdash;she shows no
+interest in the sick and injured for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They are to her cattle, or less than cattle. As the life-giver and
+race-conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping regularly
+into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the midship-house and
+dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts. On the contrary, as with her
+father, these wretched humans do not exist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still again, when the steward jammed a splinter under his nail, she was
+greatly concerned, and manipulated the tweezers and pulled it out. The Elsinore
+reminds me of a slave plantation before the war; and Miss West is the lady of
+the plantation, interested only in the house-slaves. The field slaves are
+beyond her ken or consideration, and the sailors are the Elsinore&rsquo;s field
+slaves. Why, several days back, when Wada suffered from a severe headache, she
+was quite perturbed, and dosed him with aspirin. Well, I suppose this is all
+due to her sea-training. She has been trained hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have the phonograph in the second dog-watch every other evening in this fine
+weather. On the alternate evenings this period is Mr. Pike&rsquo;s watch on
+deck. But when it is his evening below, even at dinner, he betrays his
+anticipation by an eagerness ill suppressed. And yet, on each such occasion, he
+punctiliously waits until we ask if we are to be favoured with music. Then his
+hard-bitten face lights up, although the lines remain hard as ever, hiding his
+ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly, off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over
+a few records. And so, every other evening, we watch this killer and driver,
+with lacerated knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved
+discs, ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the voyage,
+at such moments believing in God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore. I confess, while it seems
+that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with every detail of
+the little round of living, that I cannot orient myself. My mind continually
+strays from things non-understandable to things incomprehensible&mdash;from our
+Samurai captain with the exquisite Gabriel voice that is heard only in the
+tumult and thunder of storm; on to the ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with
+the bright, liquid, pain-filled eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the
+forecastle and seduce the second mate; to the perpetually muttering
+O&rsquo;Sullivan in the steel-walled hole and the complaining Davis nursing the
+marlin-spike in the upper bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift in
+this vastitude of ocean with a coal-sack at his feet. At such moments all the
+life on the <i>Elsinore</i> becomes as unreal as life to the philosopher is
+unreal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am a philosopher. Therefore, it is unreal to me. But is it unreal to Messrs.
+Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the rest of the stupid herd
+for&rsquo;ard? I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over
+the wine in Mouquin&rsquo;s. Said he: &ldquo;The profoundest instinct in man is
+to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his
+infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep
+him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free.
+Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare
+not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no
+imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope,
+Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From
+Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes to me,
+that to all these slaves of the <i>Elsinore</i> the Real is real because they
+fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with the belief that they
+are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because I have torn aside the veils
+of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a
+philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, the
+super-realist, am the only unrealist on board the <i>Elsinore</i>. Therefore I,
+who penetrate it deepest, in the whole phenomena of living on the
+<i>Elsinore</i> see it only as phantasmagoria.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paradoxes? I admit it. All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
+contradictions. But all the others on the <i>Elsinore</i>, sheer surface
+swimmers, keep afloat on this sea&mdash;forsooth, because they have never
+dreamed its depth. And I can easily imagine what Miss West&rsquo;s practical,
+hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine. After all, words
+are traps. I don&rsquo;t know what I know, nor what I think I think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This I do know: I cannot orient myself. I am the maddest and most sea-lost soul
+on board. Take Miss West. I am beginning to admire her. Why, I know not, unless
+it be because she is so abominably healthy. And yet, it is this very health of
+her, the absence of any shred of degenerative genius, that prevents her from
+being great . . . for instance, in her music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her playing.
+The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the best. To my
+astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr, and that her father
+took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago. And yet she lacks in her music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her touch is masterful. She has the firmness and weight (without sharpness or
+pounding) of a man&rsquo;s playing&mdash;the strength and surety that most
+women lack and that some women know they lack. When she makes a slip she is
+ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is overcome. And she is
+quick to overcome it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no sentiment,
+no fire. When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness and neatness. She
+is the master of Chopin&rsquo;s technique, but she never walks where Chopin
+walks on the heights. Somehow, she stops short of the fulness of music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my suggestion,
+to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies. On the Third Intermezzo she was at
+her best, and a good best it was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were talking of Debussy,&rdquo; she remarked. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got
+some of his stuff here. But I don&rsquo;t get into it. I don&rsquo;t understand
+it, and there is no use in trying. It doesn&rsquo;t seem altogether like real
+music to me. It fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold of
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet you like MacDowell,&rdquo; I challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Y. . . es,&rdquo; she admitted grudgingly. &ldquo;His New England Idylls
+and Fireside Tales. And I like that Finnish man&rsquo;s stuff, Sibelius, too,
+although it seems to me too soft, too richly soft, too beautiful, if you know
+what I mean. It seems to cloy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a pity, I thought, that with that noble masculine touch of hers she is
+unaware of the deeps of music. Some day I shall try to get from her just what
+Beethoven, say, and Chopin, mean to her. She has not read Shaw&rsquo;s
+<i>Perfect Wagnerite</i>, nor had she ever heard of Nietzsche&rsquo;s <i>Case
+of Wagner</i>. She likes Mozart, and old Boccherini, and Leonardo Leo. Likewise
+she is partial to Schumann, especially Forest Scenes. And she played his
+Papillons most brilliantly. When I closed my eyes I could have sworn it was a
+man&rsquo;s fingers on the keys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, I must say it, in the long run her playing makes me nervous. I am
+continually led up to false expectations. Always, she seems just on the verge
+of achieving the big thing, the super-big thing, and always she just misses it
+by a shade. Just as I am prepared for the culminating flash and illumination, I
+receive more perfection of technique. She is cold. She must be cold . . . Or
+else, and the theory is worth considering, she is too healthy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall certainly read to her <i>The Daughters of Herodias</i>.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Was there ever such a voyage! This morning, when I came on deck, I found nobody
+at the wheel. It was a startling sight&mdash;the great <i>Elsinore</i>, by the
+wind, under an Alpine range of canvas, every sail set from skysails to
+try-sails and spanker, slipping across the surface of a mild trade-wind sea,
+and no hand at the wheel to guide her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one was on the poop. It was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s watch, and I strolled
+for&rsquo;ard along the bridge to find him. He was on Number One hatch giving
+some instructions to the sail-makers. I awaited my chance, until he glanced up
+and greeted me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good morning,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;And what man is at the wheel
+now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That crazy Greek, Tony,&rdquo; he replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A month&rsquo;s wages to a pound of tobacco he isn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I
+offered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike looked at me with quick sharpness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is at the wheel?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; I replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he exploded into action. The age-lag left his massive frame, and he
+bounded aft along the deck at a speed no man on board could have exceeded; and
+I doubt if very many could have equalled it. He went up the poop-ladder three
+steps at a time and disappeared in the direction of the wheel behind the
+chart-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next came a promptitude of bellowed orders, and all the watch was slacking away
+after braces to starboard and pulling on after braces to port. I had already
+learned the manoeuvre. Mr. Pike was wearing ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I returned aft along the bridge Mr. Mellaire and the carpenter emerged from
+the cabin door. They had been interrupted at breakfast, for they were wiping
+their mouths. Mr. Pike came to the break of the poop, called down instructions
+to the second mate, who proceeded for&rsquo;ard, and ordered the carpenter to
+take the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the <i>Elsinore</i> swung around on her heel Mr. Pike put her on the back
+track so as to cover the water she had just crossed over. He lowered the
+glasses through which he was scanning the sea and pointed down the hatchway
+that opened into the big after-room beneath. The ladder was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must have taken the lazarette ladder with him,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West strolled out of the chart-room. He said good morning in his
+customary way, courteously to me and formally to the mate, and strolled on
+along the poop to the wheel, where he paused to glance into the binnacle.
+Turning, he went on leisurely to the break of the poop. Again he came back to
+us. Fully two minutes must have elapsed ere he spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter, Mr. Pike? Man overboard?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And took the lazarette ladder along with him?&rdquo; Captain West
+queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir. It&rsquo;s the Greek that jumped over at Baltimore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evidently the affair was not serious enough for Captain West to be the Samurai.
+He lighted a cigar and resumed his stroll. And yet he had missed nothing, not
+even the absence of the ladder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike sent look-outs aloft to every skysail-yard, and the <i>Elsinore</i>
+slipped along through the smooth sea. Miss West came up and stood beside me,
+searching the ocean with her eyes while I told her the little I knew. She
+evidenced no excitement, and reassured me by telling me how difficult it was to
+lose a man of Tony&rsquo;s suicidal type.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Their madness always seems to come upon them in fine weather or under
+safe circumstances,&rdquo; she smiled, &ldquo;when a boat can be lowered or a
+tug is alongside. And sometimes they take life&mdash;preservers with them, as
+in this case.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of an hour Mr. Pike wore the <i>Elsinore</i> around, and again
+retraced the course she must have been sailing when the Greek went over.
+Captain West still strolled and smoked, and Miss West made a brief trip below
+to give Wada forgotten instructions about Possum. Andy Pay was called to the
+wheel, and the carpenter went below to finish his breakfast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It all seemed rather callous to me. Nobody was much concerned for the man who
+was overboard somewhere on that lonely ocean. And yet I had to admit that
+everything possible was being done to find him. I talked a little with Mr.
+Pike, and he seemed more vexed than anything else. He disliked to have the
+ship&rsquo;s work interrupted in such fashion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s attitude was different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are short-handed enough as it is,&rdquo; he told me, when he joined
+us on the poop. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t afford to lose him even if he is crazy.
+We need him. He&rsquo;s a good sailor most of the time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hail came from the mizzen-skysail-yard. The Maltese Cockney it was who
+first sighted the man and called down the information. The mate, looking to
+windwards, suddenly lowered his glasses, rubbed his eyes in a puzzled way, and
+looked again. Then Miss West, using another pair of glasses, cried out in
+surprise and began to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you make of it, Miss West?&rdquo; the mate asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t seem to be in the water. He&rsquo;s standing up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s on the ladder,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d forgotten
+that. It fooled me at first. I couldn&rsquo;t understand it.&rdquo; He turned
+to the second mate. &ldquo;Mr. Mellaire, will you launch the long boat and get
+some kind of a crew into it while I back the main-yard? I&rsquo;ll go in the
+boat. Pick men that can pull an oar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You go, too,&rdquo; Miss West said to me. &ldquo;It will be an
+opportunity to get outside the <i>Elsinore</i> and see her under full
+sail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike nodded consent, so I went along, sitting near him in the stern-sheets
+where he steered, while half a dozen hands rowed us toward the suicide, who
+stood so weirdly upon the surface of the sea. The Maltese Cockney pulled the
+stroke oar, and among the other five men was one whose name I had but recently
+learned&mdash;Ditman Olansen, a Norwegian. A good seaman, Mr. Mellaire had told
+me, in whose watch he was; a good seaman, but &ldquo;crank-eyed.&rdquo; When
+pressed for an explanation Mr. Mellaire had said that he was the sort of man
+who flew into blind rages, and that one never could tell what little thing
+would produce such a rage. As near as I could grasp it, Ditman Olansen was a
+Berserker type. Yet, as I watched him pulling in good time at the oar, his
+large, pale-blue eyes seemed almost bovine&mdash;the last man in the world, in
+my judgment, to have a Berserker fit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we drew close to the Greek he began to scream menacingly at us and to
+brandish a sheath-knife. His weight sank the ladder until the water washed his
+knees, and on this submerged support he balanced himself with wild writhing and
+outflinging of arms. His face, grimacing like a monkey&rsquo;s, was not a
+pretty thing to look upon. And as he continued to threaten us with the knife I
+wondered how the problem of rescuing him would be solved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I should have trusted Mr. Pike for that. He removed the boat-stretcher from
+under the Maltese Cockney&rsquo;s feet and laid it close to hand in the
+stern-sheets. Then he had the men reverse the boat and back it upon the Greek.
+Dodging a sweep of the knife, Mr. Pike awaited his chance, until a passing wave
+lifted the boat&rsquo;s stern high, while Tony was sinking toward the trough.
+This was the moment. Again I was favoured with a sample of the lightning speed
+with which that aged man of sixty-nine could handle his body. Timed precisely,
+and delivered in a flash and with weight, the boat-stretcher came down on the
+Greek&rsquo;s head. The knife fell into the sea, and the demented creature
+collapsed and followed it, knocked unconscious. Mr. Pike scooped him out, quite
+effortlessly it seemed to me, and flung him into the boat&rsquo;s bottom at my
+feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment the men were bending to their oars and the mate was steering
+back to the <i>Elsinore</i>. It was a stout rap Mr. Pike had administered with
+the boat-stretcher. Thin streaks of blood oozed on the damp, plastered hair
+from the broken scalp. I could but stare at the lump of unconscious flesh that
+dripped sea-water at my feet. A man, all life and movement one moment, defying
+the universe, reduced the next moment to immobility and the blackness and
+blankness of death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of
+the philosopher. And in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by means
+of a stick of wood brought sharply in contact with his skull.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Tony the Greek be accounted an <i>appearance</i>, what was he now?&mdash;a
+<i>disappearance</i>? And if so, whither had he disappeared? And whence would
+he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call consciousness returned
+to him? The first word, much less the last, of the phenomena of personality and
+consciousness yet remains to be uttered by the psychologists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle of the
+<i>Elsinore</i> burst upon me. I had been so long on board, and in board of
+her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship. So low to the water was
+her hull, so delicate and slender, that the tall, sky-reaching spars and masts
+and the hugeness of the spread of canvas seemed preposterous and impossible, an
+insolent derision of the law of gravitation. It required effort to realize that
+that slim curve of hull inclosed and bore up from the sea&rsquo;s bottom five
+thousand tons of coal. And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites of men had
+conceived and constructed so stately and magnificent an element-defying
+fabric&mdash;mites of men, most woefully like the Greek at my feet, prone to
+precipitation into the blackness by means of a rap on the head with a piece of
+wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned. From
+somewhere he was reappearing. I noticed Mr. Pike look at him quickly, as if
+apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would require more
+boat-stretcher. But Tony merely fluttered his big black eyes open and stared at
+me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere he closed them again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you going to do with him?&rdquo; I asked the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Put &rsquo;m back to work,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all
+he&rsquo;s good for, and he ain&rsquo;t hurt. Somebody&rsquo;s got to work this
+ship around the Horn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below. In the
+chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers. Mr. Mellaire had turned
+in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch on deck at noon. Mr.
+Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to state, does not sleep aft. He
+shares a room in the &rsquo;midship-house with Mr. Pike&rsquo;s Nancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek. He was bundled out upon
+Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended, to recover
+consciousness as he might elect. Yes, and so inured have I become that I make
+free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself. My eyes were still filled with
+the beauty of the <i>Elsinore</i>. One does grow hard at sea.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER XIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+One does not mind the trades. We have held the north-east trade for days now,
+and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls and tinkles on the
+taffrail. Yesterday, log and observation approximated a run of two hundred and
+fifty-two miles; the day before we ran two hundred and forty, and the day
+before that two hundred and sixty-one. But one does not appreciate the force of
+the wind. So balmy and exhilarating is it that it is so much atmospheric wine.
+I delight to open my lungs and my pores to it. Nor does it chill. At any hour
+of the night, while the cabin lies asleep, I break off from my reading and go
+up on the poop in the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I never knew before what the trade wind was. And now I am infatuated with it. I
+stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever mate has the watch.
+Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr. Pike, on these delicious nights,
+stands his first watch after midnight in his pyjamas. He is a fearfully
+muscular man. Sixty-nine years seem impossible when I see his single, slimpsy
+garments pressed like fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and
+huge muscle. A splendid figure of a man! What he must have been in the hey-day
+of youth two score years and more ago passes comprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream. Here, where time
+is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the watches, where every
+hour and half-hour is persistently brought to one&rsquo;s notice by the
+striking of the ship&rsquo;s bells fore and aft, time ceases. Days merge into
+days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for one, can never remember the day of
+the week or month.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Elsinore</i> is never totally asleep. Day and night, always, there are
+the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at the wheel,
+and the officer of the deck. I lie reading in my bunk, which is on the weather
+side, and continually over my head during the long night hours impact the
+footsteps of one mate or the other, pacing up and down, and, as I well know,
+the man himself is forever peering for&rsquo;ard from the break of the poop,
+or glancing into the binnacle, or feeling and gauging the weight and direction
+of wind on his cheek, or watching the cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud
+across the stars and the moon. Always, always, there are wakeful eyes on the
+<i>Elsinore</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o&rsquo;clock, as I lay with the
+printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an abrupt outbreak
+of snarl from Mr. Pike. I located him as at the break of the poop; and the man
+at whom he snarled was Larry, evidently on the main deck beneath him. Not until
+Wada brought me breakfast did I learn what had occurred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face, and his
+querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some unlucky whim to
+venture an insolent remark under the cover of darkness on the main deck. But
+Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of the poop, had picked the offender
+unerringly. This was when the explosion occurred. Then the unfortunate Larry,
+truly half-devil and all child, had waxed sullen and retorted still more
+insolently; and the next he knew, the mate, descending upon him like a
+hurricane, had handcuffed him to the mizzen fife-rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine, on Mr. Pike&rsquo;s part, that this was one for Larry and at least ten
+for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. I&rsquo;ll not be so absurd as to
+say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters. I doubt if he has ever
+experienced fear. It is not in him. On the other hand, I am confident that he
+apprehends trouble from these men, and that it was for their benefit he made
+this example of Larry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his stupid
+brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because he bellowed out
+to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair fight. Promptly Mr. Pike was
+there with the key to the handcuffs. As if Larry had the shred of a chance
+against that redoubtable aged man! Wada reported that Larry, amongst other
+things, had lost a couple of front teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the
+day. When I met Mr. Pike on deck after eight o&rsquo;clock I glanced at his
+knuckles. They verified Wada&rsquo;s tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little events like
+the foregoing. Not only has time ceased, but the world has ceased. Strange it
+is, when I come to think of it, in all these weeks I have received no letter,
+no telephone call, no telegram, no visitor. I have not been to the play. I have
+not read a newspaper. So far as I am concerned, there are no plays nor
+newspapers. All such things have vanished with the vanished world. All that
+exists is the <i>Elsinore</i>, with her queer human freightage and her cargo of
+coal, cleaving a rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen miles away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture, who for ten
+months after his death was believed by the world to be alive. Not until the
+world learned of his death was he anything but alive to the world. By the same
+token, was he not alive? And by the same token, here on the <i>Elsinore</i>,
+has not the land-world ceased? May not the pupil of one&rsquo;s eye be, not
+merely the centre of the world, but the world itself? Truly, it is tenable that
+the world exists only in consciousness. &ldquo;The world is my idea,&rdquo;
+said Schopenhauer. Said Jules de Gaultier, &ldquo;The world is my
+invention.&rdquo; His dogma was that imagination created the Real. Ah, me, I
+know that the practical Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and
+unhealthful exercise of my wits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read <i>The Daughters of Herodias</i>
+to Miss West. It was superb in its effect&mdash;just what I had expected of
+her. She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for her father while I
+read. (She is never idle, being so essentially a nest-maker and
+comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a whole pile of these
+handkerchiefs for her father.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled, how shall I say?&mdash;oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh, with
+all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm, long gray
+eyes, when I read:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;But they smile innocently and dance on,<br />
+Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:<br />
+&lsquo;Am I not beautiful? Shall I not be loved?&rsquo;<br />
+Be patient, for they will not understand,<br />
+Not till the end of time will they put by<br />
+The weaving of slow steps about men&rsquo;s hearts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is well for the world that it is so,&rdquo; was her comment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, Symons knew women! His perfect knowledge she attested when I read that
+magnificent passage:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;They do not understand that in the world<br />
+There grows between the sunlight and the grass<br />
+Anything save themselves desirable.<br />
+It seems to them that the swift eyes of men<br />
+Are made but to be mirrors, not to see<br />
+Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.<br />
+&lsquo;For are not we,&rsquo; they say, &lsquo;the end of all?<br />
+Why should you look beyond us? If you look<br />
+Into the night, you will find nothing there:<br />
+We also have gazed often at the stars.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to
+see how she had received the thought. &ldquo;We also have gazed often at the
+stars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But wait,&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Let me read on.&rdquo; And I read:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;We, we alone among all beautiful things,<br />
+We only are real: for the rest are dreams.<br />
+Why will you follow after wandering dreams<br />
+When we await you? And you can but dream<br />
+Of us, and in our image fashion them.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True, most true,&rdquo; she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and
+power mounted in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A wonderful poem,&rdquo; she conceded&mdash;nay, proclaimed&mdash;when I
+had done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But do you not see . . .&rdquo; I began impulsively, then abandoned the
+attempt. For how could she see, being woman, the &ldquo;far-off, disastrous,
+unattainable things,&rdquo; when she, as she so stoutly averred, had gazed
+often on the stars?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She? What could she see, save what all women see&mdash;that they only are real,
+and that all the rest are dreams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias,&rdquo; said Miss West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I admitted lamely, &ldquo;we agree. You remember it is what
+I told you you were.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am grateful for the compliment,&rdquo; she said; and in those long
+gray eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and
+self-certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so large a
+part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by woman.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER XX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Heavens!&mdash;how I read in this fine weather. I take so little exercise that
+my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions, such as life
+teems with on the land, that I read myself almost stupid. Recommend me a
+sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind in his reading. I am making up
+years of it. It is an orgy, a debauch; and I am sure the addled sailors adjudge
+me the queerest creature on board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for any
+diversion. When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the north-east and
+the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my little twenty-two
+automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot. I used to shoot, when I was a
+wee lad. I can remember dragging a shot-gun around with me over the hills.
+Also, I possessed an air-rifle, with which, on great occasion, I was even able
+to slaughter a robin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space for
+deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from either side of
+the chart-house and that are of the width of the chart-house. This space again
+is restricted to one side or the other according to the slant of the morning
+and afternoon sun and the freshness of the breeze. Wherefore, Miss West&rsquo;s
+chair and mine are most frequently side by side. Captain West has a chair,
+which he infrequently occupies. He has so little to do in the working of the
+ship, taking his regular observations and working them up with such celerity,
+that he is rarely in the chart-room for any length of time. He elects to spend
+his hours in the main cabin, not reading, not doing anything save dream with
+eyes wide open in the draught of wind that pours through the open ports and
+door from out the huge crojack and the jigger staysails.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own
+laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father&rsquo;s fine linen.
+In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All hand-stitching, and
+embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-chair beside me. She avers
+that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has
+brought her home-things and land-things along with her&mdash;even to her pretty
+china for afternoon tea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker. She is a born cook. The
+steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and <i>de luxe</i> for the cabin
+table; yet Miss West is able at a moment&rsquo;s notice to improve on these
+dishes. She never lets any of their dishes come on the table without first
+planning them or passing on them. She has quick judgment, an unerring taste,
+and is possessed of the needful steel of decision. It seems she has only to
+look at a dish, no matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or
+its surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into something
+indescribably different and delicious&mdash;My, how I do eat! I am quite
+dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite. Already am I quite
+convinced that I am glad Miss West is making the voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She has sailed &ldquo;out East,&rdquo; as she quaintly calls it, and has an
+enormous repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes. In the cooking of rice
+Louis is a master; but in the making of the accompanying curry he fades into a
+blundering amateur compared with Miss West. In the matter of curry she is a
+sheer genius. How often one&rsquo;s thoughts dwell upon food when at sea!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West. I read all the
+time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to her passages, and even
+books, with which I am interested in trying her out. Then, too, such reading
+gives rise to discussions, and she has not yet uttered anything that would lead
+me to change my first judgment of her. She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl. She isn&rsquo;t a girl, she
+is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl. She has the carriage, the
+attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and yet she cannot be described as
+being in the slightest degree stately. She is generous, dependable,
+sensible&mdash;yes, and sensitive; and her superabundant vitality, the vitality
+that makes her walk so gloriously, discounts the maturity of her. Sometimes she
+seems all of thirty to me; at other times, when her spirits and risibilities
+are aroused, she scarcely seems thirteen. I shall make a point of asking
+Captain West the date of the <i>Dixie&rsquo;s</i> collision with that river
+steamer in San Francisco Bay. In a word, she is the most normal, the most
+healthy, natural woman I have ever known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair, that it is
+as invariably smooth and well-groomed as all the rest of her. On the other
+hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved by the latitude of dress she
+allows herself. She never fails of being a woman. Her sex, and the lure of it,
+is ever present. Possibly she may possess high collars, but I have never seen
+her in one on board. Her blouses are always open at the throat, disclosing one
+of her choicest assets, the muscular, adequate neck, with its fine-textured
+garmenture of skin. I embarrass myself by stealing long glances at that bare
+throat of hers and at the hint of fine, firm-surfaced shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function. At least once each
+day we make the journey for&rsquo;ard along the bridge to the top of the
+&rsquo;midship-house. Possum, who is now convalescent, accompanies us. The
+steward makes a point of being there so as to receive instructions and report
+the egg-output and laying conduct of the many hens. At the present time our
+four dozen hens are laying two dozen eggs a day, with which record Miss West is
+greatly elated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already she has given names to most of them. The cock is Peter, of course. A
+much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden. A slim, trim thing that dogs Peter&rsquo;s
+heels she calls Cleopatra. Another hen&mdash;the mellowest-voiced one of
+all&mdash;she addresses as Bernhardt. One thing I have noted: whenever she and
+the steward have passed death sentence on a non-laying hen (which occurs
+regularly once a week), she takes no part in the eating of the meat, not even
+when it is metamorphosed into one of her delectable curries. At such times she
+has a special curry made for herself of tinned lobster, or shrimp, or tinned
+chicken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, I must not forget. I have learned that it was no man-interest (in me, if
+you please) that brought about her sudden interest to come on the voyage. It
+was for her father that she came. Something is the matter with Captain West. At
+rare moments I have observed her gazing at him with a world of solicitude and
+anxiety in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was telling an amusing story at table yesterday midday, when my glance
+chanced to rest upon Miss West. She was not listening. Her food on her fork was
+suspended in the air a sheer instant as she looked at her father with all her
+eyes. It was a stare of fear. She realized that I was observing, and with
+superb control, slowly, quite naturally, she lowered the fork and rested it on
+her plate, retaining her hold on it and retaining her father&rsquo;s face in
+her look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I had seen. Yes; I had seen more than that. I had seen Captain West&rsquo;s
+face a transparent white, while his eyelids fluttered down and his lips moved
+noiselessly. Then the eyelids raised, the lips set again with their habitual
+discipline, and the colour slowly returned to his face. It was as if he had
+been away for a time and just returned. But I had seen, and guessed her secret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet it was this same Captain West, seven hours later, who chastened the
+proud sailor spirit of Mr. Pike. It was in the second dog-watch that evening, a
+dark night, and the watch was pulling away on the main deck. I had just come
+out of the chart-house door and seen Captain West pace by me, hands in pockets,
+toward the break of the poop. Abruptly, from the mizzen-mast, came a snap of
+breakage and crash of fabric. At the same instant the men fell backward and
+sprawled over the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment of silence followed, and then Captain West&rsquo;s voice went out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What carried away, Mr. Pike?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The halyards, sir,&rdquo; came the reply out of the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a pause. Again Captain West&rsquo;s voice went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Next time slack away on your sheet first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now Mr. Pike is incontestably a splendid seaman. Yet in this instance he had
+been wrong. I have come to know him, and I can well imagine the hurt to his
+pride. And more&mdash;he has a wicked, resentful, primitive nature, and though
+he answered respectfully enough, &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; I felt safe in
+predicting to myself that the poor devils under him would receive the weight of
+his resentment in the later watches of the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They evidently did; for this morning I noted a black eye on John Hackey, a San
+Francisco hoodlum, and Guido Bombini was carrying a freshly and outrageously
+swollen jaw. I asked Wada about the matter, and he soon brought me the news.
+Quite a bit of beating up takes place for&rsquo;ard of the deck-houses in the
+night watches while we of the after-guard peacefully slumber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even to-day Mr. Pike is going around sullen and morose, snarling at the men
+more than usual, and barely polite to Miss West and me when we chance to
+address him. His replies are grunted in monosyllables, and his face is set in
+superlative sourness. Miss West who is unaware of the occurrence, laughs and
+calls it a &ldquo;sea grouch&rdquo;&mdash;a phenomenon with which she claims
+large experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I know Mr. Pike now&mdash;the stubborn, wonderful old sea-dog. It will be
+three days before he is himself again. He takes a terrible pride in his
+seamanship, and what hurts him most is the knowledge that he was guilty of the
+blunder.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER XXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+To-day, twenty-eight days out, in the early morning, while I was drinking my
+coffee, still carrying the north-east trade, we crossed the line. And Charles
+Davis signalized the event by murdering O&rsquo;Sullivan. It was Boney, the
+lanky splinter of a youth in Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s watch, who brought the news.
+The second mate and I had just arrived in the hospital room, when Mr. Pike
+entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O&rsquo;Sullivan&rsquo;s troubles were over. The man in the upper bunk had
+completed the mad, sad span of his life with the marlin-spike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot understand this Charles Davis. He sat up calmly in his bunk, and
+calmly lighted his pipe ere he replied to Mr. Mellaire. He certainly is not
+insane. Yet deliberately, in cold blood, he has murdered a helpless man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;d you do it for?&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because, sir,&rdquo; said Charles Davis, applying a second match to his
+pipe, &ldquo;because&rdquo;&mdash;puff, puff&mdash;&ldquo;he bothered my
+sleep.&rdquo; Here he caught Mr. Pike&rsquo;s glowering eye.
+&ldquo;Because&rdquo;&mdash;puff, puff&mdash;&ldquo;he annoyed me. The next
+time&rdquo;&mdash;puff, puff&mdash;&ldquo;I hope better judgment will be shown
+in what kind of a man is put in with me. Besides&rdquo;&mdash;puff,
+puff&mdash;&ldquo;this top bunk ain&rsquo;t no place for me. It hurts me to get
+into it&rdquo;&mdash;puff, puff&mdash;&ldquo;an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo;
+back to that lower bunk as soon as you get O&rsquo;Sullivan out of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what&rsquo;d you do it for?&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told you, sir, because he annoyed me. I got tired of it, an&rsquo; so,
+this morning, I just put him out of his misery. An&rsquo; what are you
+goin&rsquo; to do about it? The man&rsquo;s dead, ain&rsquo;t he? An&rsquo; I
+killed &rsquo;m in self-defence. I know the law. What right&rsquo;d you to put
+a ravin&rsquo; lunatic in with me, an&rsquo; me sick an&rsquo; helpless?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By God, Davis!&rdquo; the mate burst forth. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll never
+draw your pay-day in Seattle. I&rsquo;ll fix you out for this, killing a crazy
+lashed down in his bunk an&rsquo; harmless. You&rsquo;ll follow &rsquo;m
+overside, my hearty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I do, you&rsquo;ll hang for it, sir,&rdquo; Davis retorted. He turned
+his cool eyes on me. &ldquo;An&rsquo; I call on you, sir, to witness the
+threats he&rsquo;s made. An&rsquo; you&rsquo;ll testify to them, too, in court.
+An&rsquo; he&rsquo;ll hang as sure as I go over the side. Oh, I know his
+record. He&rsquo;s afraid to face a court with it. He&rsquo;s been up too many
+a time with charges of man-killin&rsquo; an&rsquo; brutality on the high seas.
+An&rsquo; a man could retire for life an live off the interest of the fines
+he&rsquo;s paid, or his owners paid for him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut your mouth or I&rsquo;ll knock it out of your face!&rdquo; Mr. Pike
+roared, springing toward him with clenched, up-raised fist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Davis involuntarily shrank away. His flesh was weak, but not so his spirit. He
+got himself promptly in hand and struck another match.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t get my goat, sir,&rdquo; he sneered, under the shadow of
+the impending blow. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t scared to die. A man&rsquo;s got to
+die once anyway, an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s none so hard a trick to do when you
+can&rsquo;t help it. O&rsquo;Sullivan died so easy it was amazin&rsquo;.
+Besides, I ain&rsquo;t goin&rsquo; to die. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to finish this
+voyage, an&rsquo; sue the owners when I get to Seattle. I know my rights
+an&rsquo; the law. An&rsquo; I got witnesses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Truly, I was divided between admiration for the courage of this wretched sailor
+and sympathy for Mr. Pike thus bearded by a sick man he could not bring himself
+to strike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless he sprang upon the man with calculated fury, gripped him between
+the base of the neck and the shoulders with both gnarled paws, and shook him
+back and forth, violently and frightfully, for a full minute. It was a wonder
+the man&rsquo;s neck was not dislocated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I call on you to witness, sir,&rdquo; Davis gasped at me the instant he
+was free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He coughed and strangled, felt his throat, and made wry neck-movements
+indicative of injury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The marks&rsquo;ll begin to show in a few minutes,&rdquo; he murmured
+complacently as his dizziness left him and his breath came back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was too much for Mr. Pike, who turned and left the room, growling and
+cursing incoherently, deep in his throat. When I made my departure, a moment
+later, Davis was refilling his pipe and telling Mr. Mellaire that he&rsquo;d
+have him up for a witness in Seattle.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So we have had another burial at sea. Mr. Pike was vexed by it because the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, according to sea tradition, was going too fast through the
+water for a proper ceremony. Thus a few minutes of the voyage were lost by
+backing the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> main-topsail and deadening her way while
+the service was read and O&rsquo;Sullivan was slid overboard with the
+inevitable sack of coal at his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hope the coal holds out,&rdquo; Mr. Pike grumbled morosely at me five
+minutes later.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended on by servants, sipping
+afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and art, while a few
+feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all the grimy, sordid tragedy
+of sordid, malformed, brutish life plays itself out. And Captain West, remote,
+untroubled, sits dreaming in the twilight cabin while the draught of wind from
+the crojack blows upon him through the open ports. He has no doubts, no
+worries. He believes in God. All is settled and clear and well as he nears his
+far home. His serenity is vast and enviable. But I cannot shake from my eyes
+that vision of him when life forsook his veins, and his mouth slacked, and his
+eyelids closed, while his face took on the white transparency of death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wonder who will be the next to finish the game and depart with a sack of
+coal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, this is nothing, sir,&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire remarked to me cheerfully
+as we strolled the poop during the first watch. &ldquo;I was once on a voyage
+on a tramp steamer loaded with four hundred Chinks&mdash;I beg your pardon,
+sir&mdash;Chinese. They were coolies, contract labourers, coming back from
+serving their time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the cholera broke out. We hove over three hundred of them overboard,
+sir, along with both bosuns, most of the Lascar crew, and the captain, the
+mate, the third mate, and the first and third engineers. The second and one
+white oiler was all that was left below, and I was in command on deck, when we
+made port. The doctors wouldn&rsquo;t come aboard. They made me anchor in the
+outer roads and told me to heave out my dead. There was some tall buryin&rsquo;
+about that time, Mr. Pathurst, and they went overboard without canvas, coal, or
+iron. They had to. I had nobody to help me, and the Chinks below wouldn&rsquo;t
+lift a hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had to go down myself, drag the bodies on to the slings, then climb on
+deck and heave them up with the donkey. And each trip I took a drink. I was
+pretty drunk when the job was done.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you never caught it yourself?&rdquo; I queried. Mr. Mellaire held up
+his left hand. I had often noted that the index finger was missing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all that happened to me, sir. The old man&rsquo;d had a
+fox-terrier like yours. And after the old man passed out the puppy got real,
+chummy with me. Just as I was making the hoist of the last sling-load, what
+does the puppy do but jump on my leg and sniff my hand. I turned to pat him,
+and the next I knew my other hand had slipped into the gears and that finger
+wasn&rsquo;t there any more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;What abominable luck to come through
+such a terrible experience like that and then lose your finger!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I thought, sir,&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you do?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, just held it up and looked at it, and said &lsquo;My goodness
+gracious!&rsquo; and took another drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you didn&rsquo;t get the cholera afterwards?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, sir. I reckon I was so full of alcohol the germs dropped dead before
+they could get to me.&rdquo; He considered a moment. &ldquo;Candidly, Mr.
+Pathurst, I don&rsquo;t know about that alcohol theory. The old man and the
+mates died drunk, and so did the third engineer. But the chief was a
+teetotaller, and he died, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never again shall I wonder that the sea is hard. I walked apart from the second
+mate and stared up at the magnificent fabric of the <i>Elsinore</i> sweeping
+and swaying great blotting curves of darkness across the face of the starry
+sky.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER XXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Something has happened. But nobody knows, either fore or aft, except the
+interested persons, and they will not say anything. Yet the ship is abuzz with
+rumours and guesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This I do know: Mr. Pike has received a fearful blow on the head. At table,
+yesterday, at midday, I arrived late, and, passing behind his chair, I saw a
+prodigious lump on top of his head. When I was seated, facing him, I noted that
+his eyes seemed dazed; yes, and I could see pain in them. He took no part in
+the conversation, ate perfunctorily, behaved stupidly at times, and it was
+patent that he was controlling himself with an iron hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And nobody dares ask him what has happened. I know I don&rsquo;t dare ask him,
+and I am a passenger, a privileged person. This redoubtable old sea-relic has
+inspired me with a respect for him that partakes half of timidity and half of
+awe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He acts as if he were suffering from concussion of the brain. His pain is
+evident, not alone in his eyes and the strained expression of his face, but by
+his conduct when he thinks he is unobserved. Last night, just for a breath of
+air and a moment&rsquo;s gaze at the stars, I came out of the cabin door and
+stood on the main deck under the break of the poop. From directly over my head
+came a low and persistent groaning. My curiosity was aroused, and I retreated
+into the cabin, came out softly on to the poop by way of the chart-house, and
+strolled noiselessly for&rsquo;ard in my slippers. It was Mr. Pike. He was
+leaning collapsed on the rail, his head resting on his arms. He was giving
+voice in secret to the pain that racked him. A dozen feet away he could not be
+heard. But, close to his shoulder, I could hear his steady, smothered groaning
+that seemed to take the form of a chant. Also, at regular intervals, he would
+mutter:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.&rdquo; Always he repeated
+the phrase five times, then returned to his groaning. I stole away as silently
+as I had come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he resolutely stands his watches and performs all his duties of chief
+officer. Oh, I forgot. Miss West dared to quiz him, and he replied that he had
+a toothache, and that if it didn&rsquo;t get better he&rsquo;d pull it out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wada cannot learn what has happened. There were no eye-witnesses. He says that
+the Asiatic clique, discussing the affair in the cook&rsquo;s room, thinks the
+three gangsters are responsible. Bert Rhine is carrying a lame shoulder. Nosey
+Murphy is limping as from some injury in the hips. And Kid Twist has been so
+badly beaten that he has not left his bunk for two days. And that is all the
+data to build on. The gangsters are as close-mouthed as Mr. Pike. The Asiatic
+clique has decided that murder was attempted and that all that saved the mate
+was his hard skull.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I got another proof that Captain West is
+not so oblivious of what goes on aboard the <i>Elsinore</i> as he seems. I had
+gone for&rsquo;ard along the bridge to the mizzen-mast, in the shadow of which
+I was leaning. From the main deck, in the alley-way between the
+&rsquo;midship-house and the rail, came the voices of Bert Rhine, Nosey Murphy,
+and Mr. Mellaire. It was not ship&rsquo;s work. They were having a friendly,
+even sociable chat, for their voices hummed genially, and now and again one or
+another laughed, and sometimes all laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remembered Wada&rsquo;s reports on this unseamanlike intimacy of the second
+mate with the gangsters, and tried to make out the nature of the conversation.
+But the gangsters were low-voiced, and all I could catch was the tone of
+friendliness and good-nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, from the poop, came Captain West&rsquo;s voice. It was the voice, not
+of the Samurai riding the storm, but of the Samurai calm and cold. It was
+clear, soft, and mellow as the mellowest bell ever cast by eastern artificers
+of old time to call worshippers to prayer. I know I slightly chilled to
+it&mdash;it was so exquisitely sweet and yet as passionless as the ring of
+steel on a frosty night. And I knew the effect on the men beneath me was
+electrical. I could <i>feel</i> them stiffen and chill to it as I had stiffened
+and chilled. And yet all he said was:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Mellaire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; answered Mr. Mellaire, after a moment of tense silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come aft here,&rdquo; came Captain West&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I heard the second mate move along the deck beneath me and stop at the foot of
+the poop-ladder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your place is aft on the poop, Mr. Mellaire,&rdquo; said the cold,
+passionless voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; answered the second mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. Not another word was spoken. Captain West resumed his stroll on
+the weather side of the poop, and Mr. Mellaire, ascending the ladder, went to
+pacing up and down the lee side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I continued along the bridge to the forecastle head and purposely remained
+there half an hour ere I returned to the cabin by way of the main deck.
+Although I did not analyze my motive, I knew I did not desire any one to know
+that I had overheard the occurrence.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have made a discovery. Ninety per cent. of our crew is brunette. Aft, with
+the exception of Wada and the steward, who are our servants, we are all blonds.
+What led me to this discovery was Woodruff&rsquo;s <i>Effects of Tropical Light
+on White Men</i>, which I am just reading. Major Woodruff&rsquo;s thesis is
+that the white-skinned, blue-eyed Aryan, born to government and command, ever
+leaving his primeval, overcast and foggy home, ever commands and governs the
+rest of the world and ever perishes because of the too-white light he
+encounters. It is a very tenable hypothesis, and will bear looking into.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return. Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a blond Aryan.
+For&rsquo;ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate blonds, the
+remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us are brunettes. They
+will not perish. According to Woodruff, they will inherit the earth, not
+because of their capacity for mastery and government, but because of their
+skin-pigmentation which enables their tissues to resist the ravages of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I look at the four of us at table&mdash;Captain West, his daughter, Mr.
+Pike, and myself&mdash;all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet
+mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of our type on
+the earth. Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may be doomed to
+pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all peoples, disciplined
+them to obedience, taught them government, and dwelt in the palaces we have
+compelled them by the weight of our own right arms to build for us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Elsinore</i> depicts this in miniature. The best of the food and all
+spacious and beautiful accommodation is ours. For&rsquo;ard is a pig-sty and a
+slave-pen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a king, Captain West sits above all. As a captain of soldiers, Mr. Pike
+enforces his king&rsquo;s will. Miss West is a princess of the royal house. And
+I? Am I not an honourable, noble-lineaged pensioner on the deeds and
+achievements of my father, who, in his day, compelled thousands of the lesser
+types to the building of the fortune I enjoy?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The north-west trade carried us almost into the south-east trade, and then left
+us for several days to roll and swelter in the doldrums.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this time I have discovered that I have a genius for rifle-shooting. Mr.
+Pike swore I must have had long practice; and I confess I was myself startled
+by the ease of the thing. Of course, it&rsquo;s the knack; but one must be so
+made, I suppose, in order to be able to acquire the knack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the end of half an hour, standing on the heaving deck and shooting at
+bottles floating on the rolling swell, I found that I broke each bottle at the
+first shot. The supply of empty bottles giving out, Mr. Pike was so interested
+that he had the carpenter saw me a lot of small square blocks of hard wood.
+These were more satisfactory. A well-aimed shot threw them out of the water and
+spinning into the air, and I could use a single block until it had drifted out
+of range. In an hour&rsquo;s time I could, shooting quickly and at short range,
+empty my magazine at a block and hit it nine times, and, on occasion, ten
+times, out of eleven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I might not have judged my aptitude as unusual, had I not induced Miss West and
+Wada to try their hands. Neither had luck like mine. I finally persuaded Mr.
+Pike, and he went behind the wheel-house so that none of the crew might see how
+poor a shot he was. He was never able to hit the mark, and was guilty of the
+most ludicrous misses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never could get the hang of rifle-shooting,&rdquo; he announced
+disgustedly, &ldquo;but when it comes to close range with a gat I&rsquo;m right
+there. I guess I might as well overhaul mine and limber it up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went below and came back with a huge &rsquo;44 automatic pistol and a
+handful of loaded clips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anywhere from right against the body up to ten or twelve feet away,
+holding for the stomach, it&rsquo;s astonishing, Mr. Pathurst, what you can do
+with a weapon like this. Now you can&rsquo;t use a rifle in a mix-up.
+I&rsquo;ve been down and under, with a bunch giving me the boot, when I turned
+loose with this. Talk about damage! It ranged them the full length of their
+bodies. One of them&rsquo;d just landed his brogans on my face when I
+let&rsquo;m have it. The bullet entered just above his knee, smashed the
+collarbone, where it came out, and then clipped off an ear. I guess that
+bullet&rsquo;s still going. It took more than a full-sized man to stop it. So I
+say, give me a good handy gat when something&rsquo;s doing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you afraid you&rsquo;ll use all your ammunition up?&rdquo;
+he asked anxiously half an hour later, as I continued to crack away with my new
+toy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was quite reassured when I told him Wada had brought along fifty thousand
+rounds for me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of the shooting, two sharks came swimming around. They were quite
+large, Mr. Pike said, and he estimated their length at fifteen feet. It was
+Sunday morning, so that the crew, except for working the ship, had its time to
+itself, and soon the carpenter, with a rope for a fish-line and a great iron
+hook baited with a chunk of salt pork the size of my head, captured first one,
+and then the other, of the monsters. They were hoisted in on the main deck. And
+then I saw a spectacle of the cruelty of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The full crew gathered about with sheath knives, hatchets, clubs, and big
+butcher knives borrowed from the galley. I shall not give the details, save
+that they gloated and lusted, and roared and bellowed their delight in the
+atrocities they committed. Finally, the first of the two fish was thrown back
+into the ocean with a pointed stake thrust into its upper and lower jaws so
+that it could not close its mouth. Inevitable and prolonged starvation was the
+fate thus meted out to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll show you something, boys,&rdquo; Andy Fay cried, as they
+prepared to handle the second shark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Maltese Cockney had been a most capable master of ceremonies with the first
+one. More than anything else, I think, was I hardened against these brutes by
+what I saw them do. In the end, the maltreated fish thrashed about the deck
+entirely eviscerated. Nothing remained but the mere flesh-shell of the
+creature, yet it would not die. It was amazing the life that lingered when all
+the vital organs were gone. But more amazing things were to follow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mulligan Jacobs, his arms a butcher&rsquo;s to the elbows, without as much as
+&ldquo;by your leave,&rdquo; suddenly thrust a hunk of meat into my hand. I
+sprang back, startled, and dropped it to the deck, while a gleeful howl went up
+from the two-score men. I was shamed, despite myself. These brutes held me in
+little respect; and, after all, human nature is so strange a compound that even
+a philosopher dislikes being held in disesteem by the brutes of his own
+species.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked at what I had dropped. It was the heart of the shark, and as I looked,
+there under my eyes, on the scorching deck where the pitch oozed from the
+seams, the heart pulsed with life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I dared. I would not permit these animals to laugh at any fastidiousness of
+mine. I stooped and picked up the heart, and while I concealed and conquered my
+qualms I held it in my hand and felt it beat in my hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any rate, I had won a mild victory over Mulligan Jacobs; for he abandoned me
+for the more delectable diversion of torturing the shark that would not die.
+For several minutes it had been lying quite motionless. Mulligan Jacobs smote
+it a heavy blow on the nose with the flat of a hatchet, and as the thing
+galvanized into life and flung its body about the deck the little venomous man
+screamed in ecstasy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The hooks are in it!&mdash;the hooks are in it!&mdash;and burnin&rsquo;
+hot!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He squirmed and writhed with fiendish delight, and again he struck it on the
+nose and made it leap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was too much, and I beat a retreat&mdash;feigning boredom, or cessation of
+interest, of course; and absently carrying the still throbbing heart in my
+hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I came upon the poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket, emerging from
+the port door of the chart-house. The deck-chairs were on that side, so I stole
+around on the starboard side of the chart-house in order to fling overboard
+unobserved the dreadful thing I carried. But, drying on the surface in the
+tropic heat and still pulsing inside, it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad
+cast. Instead of clearing the railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck
+there in the shade, and as I opened the door to go below and wash my hands,
+with a last glance I saw it pulse where it had fallen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I came back it was still pulsing. I heard a splash overside from the waist
+of the ship, and knew the carcass had been flung overboard. I did not go around
+the chart-house and join Miss West, but stood enthralled by the spectacle of
+that heart that beat in the tropic heat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Boisterous shouts from the sailors attracted my attention. They had all climbed
+to the top of the tall rail and were watching something outboard. I followed
+their gaze and saw the amazing thing. That long-eviscerated shark was not dead.
+It moved, it swam, it thrashed about, and ever it strove to escape from the
+surface of the ocean. Sometimes it swam down as deep as fifty or a hundred
+feet, and then, still struggling to escape the surface, struggled involuntarily
+to the surface. Each failure thus to escape fetched wild laughter from the men.
+But why did they laugh? The thing was sublime, horrible, but it was not
+humorous. I leave it to you. What is there laughable in the sight of a
+pain-distraught fish rolling helplessly on the surface of the sea and exposing
+to the sun all its essential emptiness?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was turning away, when renewed shouting drew my gaze. Half a dozen other
+sharks had appeared, smaller ones, nine or ten feet long. They attacked their
+helpless comrade. They tore him to pieces they destroyed him, devoured him. I
+saw the last shred of him disappear down their maws. He was gone,
+disintegrated, entombed in the living bodies of his kind, and already entering
+into the processes of digestion. And yet, there, in the shade on the pin-rail,
+that unbelievable and monstrous heart beat on.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER XXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The voyage is doomed to disaster and death. I know Mr. Pike, now, and if ever
+he discovers the identity of Mr. Mellaire, murder will be done. Mr. Mellaire is
+not Mr. Mellaire. He is not from Georgia. He is from Virginia. His name is
+Waltham&mdash;Sidney Waltham. He is one of the Walthams of Virginia, a black
+sheep, true, but a Waltham. Of this I am convinced, just as utterly as I am
+convinced that Mr. Pike will kill him if he learns who he is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me tell how I have discovered all this. It was last night, shortly before
+midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff of the south-east trades
+in which we are now bowling along, close-hauled in order to weather Cape San
+Roque. Mr. Pike had the watch, and I paced up and down with him while he told
+me old pages of his life. He has often done this, when not
+&ldquo;sea-grouched,&rdquo; and often he has mentioned with pride&mdash;yes,
+with reverence&mdash;a master with whom he sailed five years. &ldquo;Old
+Captain Somers,&rdquo; he called him&mdash;&ldquo;the finest, squarest, noblest
+man I ever sailed under, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr. Pike, wicked
+old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the world and on the
+wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain Somers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was an old man, over seventy years old,&rdquo; Mr. Pike went on.
+&ldquo;And they say he&rsquo;d got a touch of palsy&mdash;I hadn&rsquo;t seen
+him for years. You see, I&rsquo;d had to clear out from the coast because of
+trouble. And that devil of a second mate caught him in bed late at night and
+beat him to death. It was terrible. They told me about it. Right in San
+Francisco, on board the <i>Jason Harrison</i>, it happened, eleven years ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And do you know what they did? First, they gave the murderer life, when
+he should have been hanged. His plea was insanity, from having had his head
+chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook. And when he&rsquo;d served
+seven years the governor pardoned him. He wasn&rsquo;t any good, but his people
+were a powerful old Virginian family, the Walthams&mdash;I guess you&rsquo;ve
+heard of them&mdash;and they brought all kinds of pressure to bear. His name
+was Sidney Waltham.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes before the
+change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated by the look-out on
+the forecastle head. Mr. Pike, under his stress of feeling, had stopped
+walking, and we stood at the break of the poop. As chance would have it, Mr.
+Mellaire was a quarter of an hour ahead of time, and he climbed the poop-ladder
+and stood beside us while the mate concluded his tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t mind it,&rdquo; Mr. Pike continued, &ldquo;as long as
+he&rsquo;d got life and was serving his time. But when they pardoned him out
+after only seven years I swore I&rsquo;d get him. And I will. I don&rsquo;t
+believe in God or devil, and it&rsquo;s a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do
+believe in hunches. And I know I&rsquo;m going to get him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What will you do?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do?&rdquo; Mr. Pike&rsquo;s voice was fraught with surprise that I
+should not know. &ldquo;Do? Well, what did he do to old Captain Somers? Yet
+he&rsquo;s disappeared these last three years now. I&rsquo;ve heard neither
+hide nor hair of him. But he&rsquo;s a sailor, and he&rsquo;ll drift back to
+the sea, and some day . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the illumination of a match with which the second mate was lighting his pipe
+I saw Mr. Pike&rsquo;s gorilla arms and huge clenched paws raised to heaven,
+and his face convulsed and working. Also, in that brief moment of light, I saw
+that the second mate&rsquo;s hand which held the match was shaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I ain&rsquo;t never seen even a photo of him,&rdquo; Mr. Pike added.
+&ldquo;But I&rsquo;ve got a general idea of his looks, and he&rsquo;s got a
+mark unmistakable. I could know him by it in the dark. All I&rsquo;d have to do
+is feel it. Some day I&rsquo;ll stick my fingers into that mark.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you say, sir, was the captain&rsquo;s name?&rdquo; Mr. Mellaire
+asked casually.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somers&mdash;old Captain Somers,&rdquo; Mr. Pike answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire repeated the name aloud several times, and then hazarded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t he command the <i>Lammermoor</i> thirty years ago?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought I recognized him. I lay at anchor in a ship next to his in
+Table Bay that time ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, the wickedness of the world, the wickedness of the world,&rdquo; Mr.
+Pike muttered as he turned and strode away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I said good-night to the second mate and had started to go below, when he
+called to me in a low voice, &ldquo;Mr. Pathurst!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I stopped, and then he said, hurriedly and confusedly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, sir . . . I beg your pardon . . . I&mdash;I changed my
+mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Below, lying in my bunk, I found myself unable to read. My mind was bent on
+returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my will, the most
+gruesome speculations kept suggesting themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then came Mr. Mellaire. He had slipped down the booby hatch into the big
+after-room and thence through the hallway to my room. He entered noiselessly,
+on clumsy tiptoes, and pressed his finger warningly to his lips. Not until he
+was beside my bunk did he speak, and then it was in a whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg your pardon, sir, Mr. Pathurst . . . I&mdash;I beg your pardon;
+but, you see, sir, I was just passing, and seeing you awake I . . . I thought
+it would not inconvenience you to . . . you see, I thought I might just as well
+prefer a small favour . . . seeing that I would not inconvenience you, sir . .
+. I . . . I . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I waited for him to proceed, and in the pause that ensued, while he licked his
+dry lips with his tongue, the thing ambushed in his skull peered at me through
+his eyes and seemed almost on the verge of leaping out and pouncing upon me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; he began again, this time more coherently,
+&ldquo;it&rsquo;s just a little thing&mdash;foolish on my part, of
+course&mdash;a whim, so to say&mdash;but you will remember, near the beginning
+of the voyage, I showed you a scar on my head . . . a really small affair, sir,
+which I contracted in a misadventure. It amounts to a deformity, which it is my
+fancy to conceal. Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for
+instance, know that I carried such a deformity. A man is a man, sir&mdash;you
+understand&mdash;and you have not spoken of it to her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;It just happens that I have not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor to anybody else?&mdash;to, say, Captain West?&mdash;or, say, Mr.
+Pike?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I haven&rsquo;t mentioned it to anybody,&rdquo; I averred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could not conceal the relief he experienced. The perturbation went out of
+his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back deeper into the recess of
+his skull.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will not
+mention that little matter to anybody. I suppose&rdquo; (he smiled, and his
+voice was superlatively suave) &ldquo;it is vanity on my part&mdash;you
+understand, I am sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that I desired
+to resume my reading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?&rdquo; His whole voice and
+manner had changed. It was practically a command, and I could almost see fangs,
+bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I fancied dwelt behind
+his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; I answered coldly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you, sir&mdash;I thank you,&rdquo; he said, and, without more ado,
+tiptoed from the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course I did not read. How could I? Nor did I sleep. My mind ran on, and on,
+and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly before five, did I sink
+into my first doze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing is very evident. Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer of Captain
+Somers is on board the <i>Elsinore</i>. He has never glimpsed that prodigious
+fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s, or, rather, Sidney Waltham&rsquo;s,
+skull. And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike. And I know, now, why from the
+very first I disliked the second mate. And I understand that live thing, that
+other thing, that lurks within and peers out through the eyes. I have
+recognized the same thing in the three gangsters for&rsquo;ard. Like the second
+mate, they are prison birds. The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of
+prison life has developed in all of them terrible other selves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and another thing is very evident. On board this ship, driving now through
+the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn, are all the elements of
+sea tragedy and horror. We are freighted with human dynamite that is liable at
+any moment to blow our tiny floating world to fragments.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER XXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The days slip by. The south-east trade is brisk and small splashes of sea
+occasionally invade my open ports. Mr. Pike&rsquo;s room was soaked yesterday.
+This is the most exciting thing that has happened for some time. The gangsters
+rule in the forecastle. Larry and Shorty have had a harmless <i>fight</i>. The
+hooks continue to burn in Mulligan Jacobs&rsquo;s brain. Charles Davis resides
+alone in his little steel room, coming out only to get his food from the
+galley. Miss West plays and sings, doctors Possum, launders, and is forever
+otherwise busy with her fancy work. Mr. Pike runs the phonograph every other
+evening in the second dog-watch. Mr. Mellaire hides the cleft in his head. I
+keep his secret. And Captain West, more remote than ever, sits in the draught
+of wind in the twilight cabin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are now thirty-seven days at sea, in which time, until to-day, we have not
+sighted a vessel. And to-day, at one time, no less than six vessels were
+visible from the deck. Not until I saw these ships was I able thoroughly to
+realize how lonely this ocean is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike tells me we are several hundred miles off the South American coast.
+And yet, only the other day, it seems, we were scarcely more distant from
+Africa. A big velvety moth fluttered aboard this morning, and we are filled
+with conjecture. How possibly could it have come from the South American coast
+these hundreds of miles in the teeth of the trades?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Southern Cross has been visible, of course, for weeks; the North Star has
+disappeared behind the bulge of the earth; and the Great Bear, at its highest,
+is very low. Soon it, too, will be gone and we shall be raising the Magellan
+Clouds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember the fight between Larry and Shorty. Wada reports that Mr. Pike
+watched it for some time, until, becoming incensed at their awkwardness, he
+clouted both of them with his open hands and made them stop, announcing that
+until they could make a better showing he intended doing all the fighting on
+the <i>Elsinore</i> himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a feat beyond me to realize that he is sixty-nine years old. And when I
+look at the tremendous build of him and at his fearful, man-handling hands, I
+conjure up a vision of him avenging Captain Somers&rsquo;s murder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life is cruel. Amongst the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> five thousand tons of coal
+are thousands of rats. There is no way for them to get out of their
+steel-walled prison, for all the ventilators are guarded with stout wire-mesh.
+On her previous voyage, loaded with barley, they increased and multiplied. Now
+they are imprisoned in the coal, and cannibalism is what must occur among them.
+Mr. Pike says that when we reach Seattle there will be a dozen or a score of
+survivors, huge fellows, the strongest and fiercest. Sometimes, passing the
+mouth of one ventilator that is in the after wall of the chart-house, I can
+hear their plaintive squealing and crying from far beneath in the coal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other and luckier rats are in the &rsquo;tween decks for&rsquo;ard, where all
+the spare suits of sails are stored. They come out and run about the deck at
+night, steal food from the galley, and lap up the dew. Which reminds me that
+Mr. Pike will no longer look at Possum. It seems, under his suggestion, that
+Wada trapped a rat in the donkey-engine room. Wada swears that it was the
+father of all rats, and that, by actual measurement, it scaled eighteen inches
+from nose to the tip of tail. Also, it seems that Mr. Pike and Wada, with the
+door shut in the former&rsquo;s room, pitted the rat against Possum, and that
+Possum was licked. They were compelled to kill the rat themselves, while
+Possum, when all was over, lay down and had a fit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now Mr. Pike abhors a coward, and his disgust with Possum is profound. He no
+longer plays with the puppy, nor even speaks to him, and, whenever he passes
+him on the deck, glowers sourly at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have been reading up the South Atlantic Sailing Directions, and I find that
+we are now entering the most beautiful sunset region in the world. And this
+evening we were favoured with a sample. I was in my quarters, overhauling my
+books, when Miss West called to me from the foot of the chart-house stairs:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pathurst!&mdash;Come quick! Oh, do come quick! You can&rsquo;t
+afford to miss it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half the sky, from the zenith to the western sea-line, was an astonishing sheet
+of pure, pale, even gold. And through this sheen, on the horizon, burned the
+sun, a disc of richer gold. The gold of the sky grew more golden, then
+tarnished before our eyes and began to glow faintly with red. As the red
+deepened, a mist spread over the whole sheet of gold and the burning yellow
+sun. Turner was never guilty of so audacious an orgy in gold-mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently, along the horizon, entirely completing the circle of sea and sky,
+the tight-packed shapes of the trade wind clouds began to show through the
+mist; and as they took form they spilled with rose-colour at their upper edges,
+while their bases were a pulsing, bluish-white. I say it advisedly. All the
+colours of this display <i>pulsed</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the gold-mist continued to clear away, the colours became garish, bold; the
+turquoises went into greens and the roses turned to the red of blood. And the
+purple and indigo of the long swells of sea were bronzed with the colour-riot
+in the sky, while across the water, like gigantic serpents, crawled red and
+green sky-reflections. And then all the gorgeousness quickly dulled, and the
+warm, tropic darkness drew about us.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap26"></a>CHAPTER XXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Elsinore</i> is truly the ship of souls, the world in miniature; and,
+because she is such a small world, cleaving this vastitude of ocean as our
+larger world cleaves space, the strange juxtapositions that continually occur
+are startling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For instance, this afternoon on the poop. Let me describe it. Here was Miss
+West, in a crisp duck sailor suit, immaculately white, open at the throat,
+where, under the broad collar, was knotted a man-of-war black silk neckerchief.
+Her smooth-groomed hair, a trifle rebellious in the breeze, was glorious. And
+here was I, in white ducks, white shoes, and white silk shirt, as immaculate
+and well-tended as she. The steward was just bringing the pretty tea-service
+for Miss West, and in the background Wada hovered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had been discussing philosophy&mdash;or, rather, I had been feeling her out;
+and from a sketch of Spinoza&rsquo;s anticipations of the modern mind, through
+the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in physics of Sir
+Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as usual, to De Casseres, whom
+I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled orders to the watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;In this rise into the azure of pure perception, attainable only
+by a very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born,&rsquo;.&rdquo; I was
+quoting. &ldquo;&lsquo;Life is no longer good or evil. It is a perpetual play
+of forces without beginning or end. The freed Intellect merges itself with the
+World-Will and partakes of its essence, which is not a moral essence but an
+&aelig;sthetic essence . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at this moment the watch swarmed on to the poop to haul on the port-braces
+of the mizzen-sky-sail, royal and topgallant-sail. The sailors passed us, or
+toiled close to us, with lowered eyes. They did not look at us, so far removed
+from them were we. It was this contrast that caught my fancy. Here were the
+high and low, slaves and masters, beauty and ugliness, cleanness and filth.
+Their feet were bare and scaled with patches of tar and pitch. Their unbathed
+bodies were garmented in the meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty, ragged, and
+sparse. Each one had on but two garments&mdash;dungaree trousers and a shoddy
+cotton shirt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And we, in our comfortable deck-chairs, our two servants at our backs, the
+quintessence of elegant leisure, sipped delicate tea from beautiful, fragile
+cups, and looked on at these wretched ones whose labour made possible the
+journey of our little world. We did not speak to them, nor recognize their
+existence, any more than would they have dared speak to us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Miss West, with the appraising eye of a plantation mistress for the
+condition of her field slaves, looked them over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see how they have fleshed up,&rdquo; she said, as they coiled the
+last turns of the ropes over the pins and faded away for&rsquo;ard off the
+poop. &ldquo;It is the regular hours, the good weather, the hard work, the open
+air, the sufficient food, and the absence of whisky. And they will keep in this
+fettle until they get off the Horn. And then you will see them go down from day
+to day. A winter passage of the Horn is always a severe strain on the men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But then, once we are around and in the good weather of the Pacific, you
+will see them gain again from day to day. And when we reach Seattle they will
+be in splendid shape. Only they will go ashore, drink up their wages in several
+days, and ship away on other vessels in precisely the same sodden, miserable
+condition that they were in when they sailed with us from Baltimore.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And just then Captain West came out the chart-house door, strolled by for a
+single turn up and down, and with a smile and a word for us and an
+all-observant eye for the ship, the trim of her sails, the wind, and the sky,
+and the weather promise, went back through the chart-house door&mdash;the blond
+Aryan master, the king, the Samurai.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I finished sipping my tea of delicious and most expensive aroma, and our
+slant-eyed, dark-skinned servitors carried the pretty gear away, and I read,
+continuing De Casseres:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Instinct wills, creates, carries on the work of the species. The
+Intellect destroys, negatives, satirizes and ends in pure nihilism, instinct
+creates life, endlessly, hurling forth profusely and blindly its clowns,
+tragedians and comedians. Intellect remains the eternal spectator of the play.
+It participates at will, but never gives itself wholly to the fine sport. The
+Intellect, freed from the trammels of the personal will, soars into the ether
+of perception, where Instinct follows it in a thousand disguises, seeking to
+draw it down to earth.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap27"></a>CHAPTER XXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+We are now south of Rio and working south. We are out of the latitude of the
+trades, and the wind is capricious. Rain squalls and wind squalls vex the
+<i>Elsinore</i>. One hour we may be rolling sickeningly in a dead calm, and the
+next hour we may be dashing fourteen knots through the water and taking off
+sail as fast as the men can clew up and lower away. A night of calm, when sleep
+is well-nigh impossible in the sultry, muggy air, may be followed by a day of
+blazing sun and an oily swell from the south&rsquo;ard, connoting great gales
+in that area of ocean we are sailing toward&mdash;or all day long the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, under an overcast sky, royals and sky sails furled, may plunge
+and buck under wind-pressure into a short and choppy head-sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all this means work for the men. Taking Mr. Pike&rsquo;s judgment, they are
+very inadequate, though by this time they know the ropes. He growls and
+grumbles, and snorts and sneers whenever he watches them doing anything.
+To-day, at eleven in the morning, the wind was so violent, continuing in
+greater gusts after having come in a great gust, that Mr. Pike ordered the
+mainsail taken off. The great crojack was already off. But the watch could not
+clew up the mainsail, and, after much vain sing-songing and pull-hauling, the
+watch below was routed out to bear a hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My God!&rdquo; Mr. Pike groaned to me. &ldquo;Two watches for a rag like
+that when half a decent watch could do it! Look at that preventer bosun of
+mine!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Nancy! He looked the saddest, sickest, bleakest creature I had ever seen.
+He was so wretched, so miserable, so helpless. And Sundry Buyers was just as
+impotent. The expression on his face was of pain and hopelessness, and as he
+pressed his abdomen he lumbered futilely about, ever seeking something he might
+do and ever failing to find it. He pottered. He would stand and stare at one
+rope for a minute or so at a time, following it aloft with his eyes through the
+maze of ropes and stabs and gears with all the intentness of a man working out
+an intricate problem. Then, holding his hand against his stomach, he would
+lumber on a few steps and select another rope for study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh dear, oh dear,&rdquo; Mr. Pike lamented. &ldquo;How can one drive
+with bosuns like that and a crew like that? Just the same, if I was captain of
+this ship I&rsquo;d drive &rsquo;em. I&rsquo;d show &rsquo;em what drive was,
+if I had to lose a few of them. And when they grow weak off the Horn
+what&rsquo;ll we do? It&rsquo;ll be both watches all the time, which will
+weaken them just that much the faster.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evidently this winter passage of the Horn is all that one has been led to
+expect from reading the narratives of the navigators. Iron men like the two
+mates are very respectful of &ldquo;Cape Stiff,&rdquo; as they call that
+uttermost tip of the American continent. Speaking of the two mates, iron-made
+and iron-mouthed that they are, it is amusing that in really serious moments
+both of them curse with &ldquo;Oh dear, oh dear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spells of calm I take great delight in the little rifle. I have already
+fired away five thousand rounds, and have come to consider myself an expert.
+Whatever the knack of shooting may be, I&rsquo;ve got it. When I get back I
+shall take up target practice. It is a neat, deft sport.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only is Possum afraid of the sails and of rats, but he is afraid of
+rifle-fire, and at the first discharge goes yelping and ki-yi-ing below. The
+dislike Mr. Pike has developed for the poor little puppy is ludicrous. He even
+told me that if it were his dog he&rsquo;d throw it overboard for a target.
+Just the same, he is an affectionate, heart-warming little rascal, and has
+already crept so deep into my heart that I am glad Miss West did not accept
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And&mdash;oh!&mdash;he insists on sleeping with me on top the bedding; a
+proceeding which has scandalized the mate. &ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;ll be
+using your toothbrush next,&rdquo; Mr. Pike growled at me. But the puppy loves
+my companionship, and is never happier than when on the bed with me. Yet the
+bed is not entirely paradise, for Possum is badly frightened when ours is the
+lee side and the seas pound and smash against the glass ports. Then the little
+beggar, electric with fear to every hair tip, crouches and snarls menacingly
+and almost at the same time whimpers appeasingly at the storm-monster outside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Father <i>knows</i> the sea,&rdquo; Miss West said to me this afternoon.
+&ldquo;He understands it, and he loves it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or it may be habit,&rdquo; I ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He does know it. And he loves it. That is why he has come back to it.
+All his people before him were sea folk. His grandfather, Anthony West, made
+forty-six voyages between 1801 and 1847. And his father, Robert, sailed master
+to the north-west coast before the gold days and was captain of some of the
+fastest Cape Horn clippers after the gold discovery. Elijah West,
+father&rsquo;s great-grandfather, was a privateersman in the Revolution. He
+commanded the armed brig <i>New Defence</i>. And, even before that,
+Elijah&rsquo;s father, in turn, and Elijah&rsquo;s father&rsquo;s father, were
+masters and owners on long-voyage merchant adventures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anthony West, in 1813 and 1814, commanded the <i>David Bruce</i>, with
+letters of marque. He was half-owner, with Gracie &amp; Sons as the other
+half-owners. She was a two-hundred-ton schooner, built right up in Maine. She
+carried a long eighteen-pounder, two ten-pounders, and ten six-pounders, and
+she sailed like a witch. She ran the blockade off Newport and got away to the
+English Channel and the Bay of Biscay. And, do you know, though she only cost
+twelve thousand dollars all told, she took over three hundred thousand dollars
+of British prizes. A brother of his was on the <i>Wasp</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So, you see, the sea is in our blood. She is our mother. As far back as
+we can trace all our line was born to the sea.&rdquo; She laughed and went on.
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve pirates and slavers in our family, and all sorts of
+disreputable sea-rovers. Old Ezra West, just how far back I don&rsquo;t
+remember, was executed for piracy and his body hung in chains at Plymouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The sea is father&rsquo;s blood. And he knows, well, a ship, as you
+would know a dog or a horse. Every ship he sails has a distinct personality for
+him. I have watched him, in high moments, and <i>seen</i> him think. But oh!
+the times I have seen him when he does not think&mdash;when he <i>feels</i> and
+knows everything without thinking at all. Really, with all that appertains to
+the sea and ships, he is an artist. There is no other word for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You think a great deal of your father,&rdquo; I remarked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is the most wonderful man I have ever known,&rdquo; she replied.
+&ldquo;Remember, you are not seeing him at his best. He has never been the same
+since mother&rsquo;s death. If ever a man and woman were one, they were.&rdquo;
+She broke off, then concluded abruptly. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know him. You
+don&rsquo;t know him at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap28"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think we are going to have a fine sunset,&rdquo; Captain West remarked
+last evening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West and I abandoned our rubber of cribbage and hastened on deck. The
+sunset had not yet come, but all was preparing. As we gazed we could see the
+sky gathering the materials, grouping the gray clouds in long lines and
+towering masses, spreading its palette with slow-growing, glowing tints and
+sudden blobs of colour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the Golden Gate!&rdquo; Miss West cried, indicating the west.
+&ldquo;See! We&rsquo;re just inside the harbour. Look to the south there. If
+that isn&rsquo;t the sky-line of San Francisco! There&rsquo;s the Call
+Building, and there, far down, the Ferry Tower, and surely that is the
+Fairmount.&rdquo; Her eyes roved back through the opening between the cloud
+masses, and she clapped her hands. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a sunset within a sunset!
+See! The Farallones!&rdquo;&mdash;swimming in a miniature orange and red sunset
+all their own. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it the Golden Gate, and San Francisco, and
+the Farallones?&rdquo; She appealed to Mr. Pike, who, leaning near, on the
+poop-rail, was divided between gazing sourly at Nancy pottering on the main
+deck and sourly at Possum, who, on the bridge, crouched with terror each time
+the crojack flapped emptily above him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate turned his head and favoured the sky picture with a solemn stare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;It may look like the
+Farallones to you, but to me it looks like a battleship coming right in the
+Gate with a bone in its teeth at a twenty-knot clip.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sure enough. The floating Farallones had metamorphosed into a giant warship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green. It was green,
+green, green&mdash;the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and yellow
+green and tawny-brown green of autumn. There were orange green, gold green, and
+a copper green. And all these greens were rich green beyond description; and
+yet the richness and the greenness passed even as we gazed upon it, going out
+of the gray clouds and into the sea, which assumed the exquisite golden pink of
+polished copper, while the hollows of the smooth and silken ripples were
+touched by a most ethereal pea green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gray clouds became a long, low swathe of ruby red, or garnet red&mdash;such
+as one sees in a glass of heavy burgundy when held to the light. There was such
+depth to this red! And, below it, separated from the main colour-mass by a line
+of gray-white fog, or line of sea, was another and smaller streak of
+ruddy-coloured wine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I strolled across the poop to the port side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! Come back! Look! Look!&rdquo; Miss West cried to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use?&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve something
+just as good over here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The eastern heavens were equally spectacular. That quarter of the sky was sheer
+and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which faded, changed, through
+every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose, all trembling, palpitating, with
+misty blue tinting into pink. The reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon
+the water made of the sea a glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue,
+Nile-green, and salmon-pink. It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that
+veneered and flossed the softly moving, wavy water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted mist of
+the sky-shell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely different
+sunset&mdash;what would be accounted a very excellent orange-and-red sunset
+anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and tinted on all their
+under edges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh!&rdquo; Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our
+fresh discovery. &ldquo;Look at the sunset I got here to the north. It
+ain&rsquo;t doing so badly now, I leave it to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it wasn&rsquo;t. The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and cloud,
+that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the horizon to the
+zenith. It was all amazing. Four sunsets at the one time in the sky! Each
+quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a sunset distinctly its own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still misty, wept
+tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea. And then came the hush
+of darkness and the night, and we came to ourselves, out of reverie, sated with
+beauty, leaning toward each other as we leaned upon the rail side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I never grow tired of watching Captain West. In a way he bears a sort of
+resemblance to several of Washington&rsquo;s portraits. He is six feet of
+aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately grace of
+movement. His thinness is almost ascetic. In appearance and manner he is the
+perfect old-type New England gentleman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He has the same gray eyes as his daughter, although his are genial rather than
+warm; and his eyes have the same trick of smiling. His skin is pinker than
+hers, and his brows and lashes are fairer. But he seems removed beyond passion,
+or even simple enthusiasm. Miss West is firm, like her father; but there is
+warmth in her firmness. He is clean, he is sweet and courteous; but he is
+coolly sweet, coolly courteous. With all his certain graciousness, in cabin or
+on deck, so far as his social equals are concerned, his graciousness is cool,
+elevated, thin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is the perfect master of the art of doing nothing. He never reads, except
+the Bible; yet he is never bored. Often, I note him in a deck-chair, studying
+his perfect finger-nails, and, I&rsquo;ll swear, not seeing them at all. Miss
+West says he loves the sea. And I ask myself a thousand times, &ldquo;But
+how?&rdquo; He shows no interest in any phase of the sea. Although he called
+our attention to the glorious sunset I have just described, he did not remain
+on deck to enjoy it. He sat below, in the big leather chair, not reading, not
+dozing, but merely gazing straight before him at nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days pass, and the seasons pass. We left Baltimore at the tail-end of
+winter, went into spring and on through summer, and now we are in fall weather
+and urging our way south to the winter of Cape Horn. And as we double the Cape
+and proceed north, we shall go through spring and summer&mdash;a long
+summer&mdash;pursuing the sun north through its declination and arriving at
+Seattle in summer. And all these seasons have occurred, and will have occurred,
+in the space of five months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our white ducks are gone, and, in south latitude thirty-five, we are wearing
+the garments of a temperate clime. I notice that Wada has given me heavier
+underclothes and heavier pyjamas, and that Possum, of nights, is no longer
+content with the top of the bed but must crawl underneath the bed-clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are now off the Plate, a region notorious for storms, and Mr. Pike is on the
+lookout for a pampero. Captain West does not seem to be on the lookout for
+anything; yet I notice that he spends longer hours on deck when the sky and
+barometer are threatening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yesterday we had a hint of Plate weather, and to-day an awesome fiasco of the
+same. The hint came last evening between the twilight and the dark. There was
+practically no wind, and the <i>Elsinore</i>, just maintaining steerage way by
+means of intermittent fans of air from the north, floundered exasperatingly in
+a huge glassy swell that rolled up as an echo from some blown-out storm to the
+south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ahead of us, arising with the swiftness of magic, was a dense slate-blackness.
+I suppose it was cloud-formation, but it bore no semblance to clouds. It was
+merely and sheerly a blackness that towered higher and higher until it overhung
+us, while it spread to right and left, blotting out half the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still the light puffs from the north filled our sails; and still, as the
+<i>Elsinore</i> floundered on the huge, smooth swells and the sails emptied and
+flapped a hollow thunder, we moved slowly towards that ominous blackness. In
+the east, in what was quite distinctly an active thunder cloud, the lightning
+fairly winked, while the blackness in front of us was rent with blobs and
+flashes of lightning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last puffs left us, and in the hushes, between the rumbles of the nearing
+thunder, the voices of the men aloft on the yards came to one&rsquo;s ear as if
+they were right beside one instead of being hundreds of feet away and up in the
+air. That they were duly impressed by what was impending was patent from the
+earnestness with which they worked. Both watches toiled under both mates, and
+Captain West strolled the poop in his usual casual way, and gave no orders at
+all, save in low conversational tones, when Mr. Pike came upon the poop and
+conferred with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West, having deserted the scene five minutes before, returned, a proper
+sea-woman, clad in oil-skins, sou&rsquo;wester, and long sea-boots. She ordered
+me, quite peremptorily, to do the same. But I could not bring myself to leave
+the deck for fear of missing something, so I compromised by having Wada bring
+my storm-gear to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the wind came, smack out of the blackness, with the abruptness of
+thunder and accompanied by the most diabolical thunder. And with the rain and
+thunder came the blackness. It was tangible. It drove past us in the bellowing
+wind like so much stuff that one could feel. Blackness as well as wind impacted
+on us. There is no other way to describe it than by the old, ancient old, way
+of saying one could not see his hand before his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it splendid!&rdquo; Miss West shouted into my ear, close
+beside me, as we clung to the railing of the break of the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Superb!&rdquo; I shouted back, my lips to her ear, so that her hair
+tickled my face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, I know not why&mdash;it must have been spontaneous with both of
+us&mdash;in that shouting blackness of wind, as we clung to the rail to avoid
+being blown away, our hands went out to each other and my hand and hers gripped
+and pressed and then held mutually to the rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Daughter of Herodias,&rdquo; I commented grimly to myself; but my hand
+did not leave hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is happening?&rdquo; I shouted in her ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve lost way,&rdquo; came her answer. &ldquo;I think we&rsquo;re
+caught aback! The wheel&rsquo;s up, but she could not steer!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Gabriel voice of the Samurai rang out. &ldquo;Hard over?&rdquo; was his
+mellow storm-call to the man at the wheel. &ldquo;Hard over, sir,&rdquo; came
+the helmsman&rsquo;s reply, vague, cracked with strain, and smothered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the lightning, before us, behind us, on every side, bathing us in flaming
+minutes at a time. And all the while we were deafened by the unceasing uproar
+of thunder. It was a weird sight&mdash;far aloft the black skeleton of spars
+and masts from which the sails had been removed; lower down, the sailors
+clinging like monstrous bugs as they passed the gaskets and furled; beneath
+them the few set sails, filled backward against the masts, gleaming whitely,
+wickedly, evilly, in the fearful illumination; and, at the bottom, the deck and
+bridge and houses of the <i>Elsinore</i>, and a tangled riff-raff of flying
+ropes, and clumps and bunches of swaying, pulling, hauling, human creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a great moment, the master&rsquo;s moment&mdash;caught all aback with
+all our bulk and tonnage and infinitude of gear, and our heaven-aspiring masts
+two hundred feet above our heads. And our master was there, in sheeting flame,
+slender, casual, imperturbable, with two men&mdash;one of them a
+murderer&mdash;under him to pass on and enforce his will, and with a horde of
+inefficients and weaklings to obey that will, and pull, and haul, and by the
+sheer leverages of physics manipulate our floating world so that it would
+endure this fury of the elements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What happened next, what was done, I do not know, save that now and again I
+heard the Gabriel voice; for the darkness came, and the rain in pouring,
+horizontal sheets. It filled my mouth and strangled my lungs as if I had fallen
+overboard. It seemed to drive up as well as down, piercing its way under my
+sou&rsquo;wester, through my oilskins, down my tight-buttoned collar, and into
+my sea-boots. I was dizzied, obfuscated, by all this onslaught of thunder,
+lightning, wind, blackness, and water. And yet the master, near to me, there on
+the poop, lived and moved serenely in all, voicing his wisdom and will to the
+wisps of creatures who obeyed and by their brute, puny strength pulled braces,
+slacked sheets, dragged courses, swung yards and lowered them, hauled on
+buntlines and clewlines, smoothed and gasketed the huge spreads of canvas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How it happened I know not, but Miss West and I crouched together, clinging to
+the rail and to each other in the shelter of the thrumming weather-cloth. My
+arm was about her and fast to the railing; her shoulder pressed close against
+me, and by one hand she held tightly to the lapel of my oilskin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later we made our way across the poop to the chart-house, helping each
+other to maintain footing as the <i>Elsinore</i> plunged and bucked in the
+rising sea and was pressed over and down by the weight of wind on her few
+remaining set sails. The wind, which had lulled after the rain, had risen in
+recurrent gusts to storm violence. But all was well with the gallant ship. The
+crisis was past, and the ship lived, and we lived, and with streaming faces and
+bright eyes we looked at each other and laughed in the bright light of the
+chart-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who can blame one for loving the sea?&rdquo; Miss West cried out
+exultantly, as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had gone adrift
+in the turmoil. &ldquo;And the men of the sea!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;The
+masters of the sea! You saw my father . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a king,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a king,&rdquo; she repeated after me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the <i>Elsinore</i> lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side, so
+that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed the open
+door to the cabin I glanced in. There sat Captain West, whom I had thought
+still on deck. His storm-trappings were removed, his sea-boots replaced by
+slippers; and he leaned back in the big leather chair, eyes wide open,
+beholding visions in the curling smoke of a cigar against a background of
+wildly reeling cabin wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco. Last
+night&rsquo;s was a real pampero&mdash;though a mild one. To-day&rsquo;s
+promised to be a far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke.
+The wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had all
+our topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a dead calm. By eleven the
+stuff began making up ominously in the south&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The overcast sky closed down. Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the
+cloud-zenith. The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half a mile
+away. The <i>Elsinore</i> was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and sea. The
+lightning played. Sky and horizon drew so close that the <i>Elsinore</i> seemed
+on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it, sucked up by it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked lightning, and the
+wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green. The rain, beginning gently, in dead
+calm, grew into a deluge of enormous streaming drops. It grew darker and
+darker, a green darkness, and in the cabin, although it was midday, Wada and
+the steward lighted lamps. The lightning came closer and closer, until the ship
+was enveloped in it. The green darkness was continually a-tremble with flame,
+through which broke greater illuminations of forked lightning. These became
+more violent as the rain lessened, and, so absolutely were we centred in this
+electrical maelstrom, there was no connecting any chain or flash or fork of
+lightning with any particular thunder-clap. The atmosphere all about us paled
+and flamed. Such a crashing and smashing! We looked every moment for the
+<i>Elsinore</i> to be struck. And never had I seen such colours in lightning.
+Although from moment to moment we were dazzled by the greater bolts, there
+persisted always a tremulous, pulsing lesser play of light, sometimes softly
+blue, at other times a thin purple that quivered on into a thousand shades of
+lavender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there was no wind. No wind came. Nothing happened. The <i>Elsinore</i>,
+naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and crojack furled, was
+prepared for anything. Her lower-topsails hung in limp emptiness from the
+yards, heavy with rain and flapping soggily when she rolled. The cloud mass
+thinned, the day brightened, the green blackness passed into gray twilight, the
+lightning eased, the thunder moved along away from us, and there was no wind.
+In half an hour the sun was shining, the thunder muttered intermittently along
+the horizon, and the <i>Elsinore</i> still rolled in a hush of air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t tell, sir,&rdquo; Mr. Pike growled to me. &ldquo;Thirty
+years ago I was dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come
+on just as that come on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on the poop
+to relieve the mate, stood beside me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world,&rdquo; he concurred.
+&ldquo;Eighteen years ago the Plate gave it to me&mdash;lost half our sticks,
+twenty hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered. I was two days in
+the boat before an English tramp picked us up. And none of the other boats ever
+was picked up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The <i>Elsinore</i> behaved very well last night,&rdquo; I put in
+cheerily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, hell, that wasn&rsquo;t nothing,&rdquo; Mr. Pike grumbled.
+&ldquo;Wait till you see a real pampero. It&rsquo;s a dirty stretch hereabouts,
+and I, for one, &rsquo;ll be glad when we get across It. I&rsquo;d sooner have
+a dozen Cape Horn snorters than one of these. How about you, Mr.
+Mellaire?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Same here, sir,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Those sou&rsquo;-westers are
+honest. You know what to expect. But here you never know. The best of
+ship-masters can get tripped up off the Plate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;As I&rsquo;ve found out . . .<br />
+Beyond a doubt,&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb&rsquo;s <i>Celeste</i>, as he went down the
+ladder.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap29"></a>CHAPTER XXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the Argentine.
+Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden, flung disorderly,
+generously, over the western half of the sky, while in the east was painted a
+second sunset&mdash;a reflection, perhaps, of the first. At any rate, the
+eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds that shed soft, spread rays of blue and
+white upon a blue-grey sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the west.
+Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier, spacious and
+lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and more
+celestial than that of the Colorado. The clouds took on the same stratified,
+serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the hollows were filled with the opal
+blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the dust
+being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the pampas of the
+Argentine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And our sunset to-night&mdash;I am writing this at midnight, as I sit propped
+in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the <i>Elsinore</i> wallows damnably
+in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn region, where, it
+does seem, gales perpetually blow. But our sunset. Turner might have
+perpetrated it. The west was as if a painter had stood off and slapped
+brushfuls of gray at a green canvas. On this green background of sky the clouds
+spilled and crumpled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But such a background! Such an orgy of green! No shade of green was missing in
+the interstices, large and small, between the milky, curdled
+clouds&mdash;Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand
+shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful olive-green that
+tarnished into a rich bronze-green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of pink, and
+blue, and pale green, and yellow. A little later, when the sun was quite down,
+in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered a wine-red mass of colour,
+that faded to bronze and tinged all the fading greens with its sanguinary hue.
+The clouds themselves flushed to rose of all shades, while a fan of gigantic
+streamers of pale rose radiated toward the zenith. These deepened rapidly into
+flaunting rose-flame and burned long in the slow-closing twilight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in my brain
+hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my head, and the trample
+and drag of feet as the men move from rope to rope and pull and haul. More
+weather is making, and from the way sail is being taken in it cannot be far
+off.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead calm and
+sickly swell. Miss West says the barometer is down, but that the warning has
+been too long, for the Plate, to amount to anything. Pamperos happen quickly
+here, and though the <i>Elsinore</i>, under bare poles to her upper-topsails,
+is prepared for anything, it may well be that they will be crowding on canvas
+in another hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails, and the
+gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai came on deck,
+strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then spoke in an undertone to
+Mr. Pike. Mr. Pike did not like it. To me, a tyro, it was evident that he
+disagreed with his master. Nevertheless, his voice went out in a snarl aloft to
+the men on the royal-yards to make all fast again. Then it was clewlines and
+buntlines and lowering of yards as the topgallant-sails were stripped off. The
+crojack was taken in, and some of the outer fore-and-aft handsails, whose order
+of names I can never remember.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear sky. I could
+see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased. The Samurai had been mistaken. And each
+time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked topgallant- and royal-yards, I knew
+his thought was that they might well be carrying sail. I was quite convinced
+that the Plate had fooled Captain West. So was Miss West convinced, and, being
+a favoured person like myself, she frankly told me so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Father will be setting sail in half an hour,&rdquo; she prophesied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What superior weather-sense Captain West possesses I know not, save that it is
+his by Samurai right. The sky, as I have said, was clear. The air was
+brittle&mdash;sparkling gloriously in the windy sun. And yet, behold, in a
+brief quarter of an hour, the change that took place. I had just returned from
+a trip below, and Miss West was venting her scorn on the River Plate and
+promising to go below to the sewing-machine, when we heard Mr. Pike groan. It
+was a whimsical groan of disgust, contrition, and acknowledgment of inferiority
+before the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here comes the whole River Plate,&rdquo; was what he groaned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Following his gaze to the south-west, we saw it coming. It was a cloud-mass
+that blotted out the sunlight and the day. It seemed to swell and belch and
+roll over and over on itself as it advanced with a rapidity that told of
+enormous wind behind it and in it. Its speed was headlong, terrific; and,
+beneath it, covering the sea, advancing with it, was a gray bank of mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West spoke to the mate, who bawled the order along, and the watch,
+reinforced by the watch below, began clewing up the mainsail and foresail and
+climbing into the rigging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Keep off! Put your wheel over! Hard over!&rdquo; Captain West called
+gently to the helmsman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the big wheel spun around, and the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> bow fell off so
+that she might not be caught aback by the onslaught of wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thunder rode in that rushing, rolling blackness of cloud; and it was rent by
+lightning as it fell upon us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was rain, wind, obscureness of gloom, and lightning. I caught a glimpse
+of the men on the lower-yards as they were blotted from view and as the
+<i>Elsinore</i> heeled over and down. There were fifteen men of them to each
+yard, and the gaskets were well passed ere we were struck. How they regained
+the deck I do not know, I never saw; for the <i>Elsinore</i>, under only upper-
+and lower-topsails, lay down on her side, her port-rail buried in the sea, and
+did not rise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no maintaining an unsupported upright position on that acute slant of
+deck. Everybody held on. Mr. Pike frankly gripped the poop-rail with both
+hands, and Miss West and I made frantic clutches and scrambled for footing. But
+I noticed that the Samurai, poised lightly, like a bird on the verge of flight,
+merely rested one hand on the rail. He gave no orders. As I divined, there was
+nothing to be done. He waited&mdash;that was all&mdash;in tranquillity and
+repose. The situation was simple. Either the masts would go, or the
+<i>Elsinore</i> would rise with her masts intact, or she would never rise
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime she lay dead, her lee yardarms almost touching the sea, the sea
+creaming solidly to her hatch-combings across the buried, unseen rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The minutes were as centuries, until the bow paid off and the <i>Elsinore</i>,
+turned tail before it, righted to an even keel. Immediately this was
+accomplished Captain West had her brought back upon the wind. And immediately,
+thereupon, the big foresail went adrift from its gaskets. The shock, or
+succession of shocks, to the ship, from the tremendous buffeting that followed,
+was fearful. It seemed she was being racked to pieces. Master and mate were
+side by side when this happened, and the expressions on their faces typified
+them. In neither face was apprehension. Mr. Pike&rsquo;s face bore a sour sneer
+for the worthless sailors who had botched the job. Captain West&rsquo;s face
+was serenely considerative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, nothing was to be done, could be done; and for five minutes the
+<i>Elsinore</i> was shaken as in the maw of some gigantic monster, until the
+last shreds of the great piece of canvas had been torn away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our foresail has departed for Africa,&rdquo; Miss West laughed in my
+ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She is like her father, unaware of fear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now we may as well go below and be comfortable,&rdquo; she said five
+minutes later. &ldquo;The worst is over. It will only be blow, blow, blow, and
+a big sea making.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All day it blew. And the big sea that arose made the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i>
+conduct almost unlivable. My only comfort was achieved by taking to my bunk and
+wedging myself with pillows buttressed against the bunk&rsquo;s sides by empty
+soap-boxes which Wada arranged. Mr. Pike, clinging to my door-casing while his
+legs sprawled adrift in a succession of terrific rolls, paused to tell me that
+it was a new one on him in the pampero line. It was all wrong from the first.
+It had not come on right. It had no reason to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused a little longer, and, in a casual way, that under the circumstances
+was ridiculously transparent, exposed what was at ferment in his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First of all he was absurd enough to ask if Possum showed symptoms of
+sea-sickness. Next, he unburdened his wrath for the inefficients who had lost
+the foresail, and sympathized with the sail-makers for the extra work thrown
+upon them. Then he asked permission to borrow one of my books, and, clinging to
+my bunk, selected Buchner&rsquo;s <i>Force and Matter</i> from my shelf,
+carefully wedging the empty space with the doubled magazine I use for that
+purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still he was loth to depart, and, cudgelling his brains for a pretext, he set
+up a rambling discourse on River Plate weather. And all the time I kept
+wondering what was behind it all. At last it came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the way, Mr. Pathurst,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;do you happen to
+remember how many years ago Mr. Mellaire said it was that he was dismasted and
+foundered off here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I caught his drift on the instant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eight years ago, wasn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; I lied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike let this sink in and slowly digested it, while the <i>Elsinore</i> was
+guilty of three huge rolls down to port and back again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now I wonder what ship was sunk off the Plate eight years ago?&rdquo; he
+communed, as if with himself. &ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll have to ask Mr.
+Mellaire her name. You can search me for all any I can recollect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thanked me with unwonted elaborateness for <i>Force and Matter</i>, of which
+I knew he would never read a line, and felt his way to the door. Here he hung
+on for a moment, as if struck by a new and most accidental idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now it wasn&rsquo;t, by any chance, that he said eighteen years
+ago?&rdquo; he queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eight years ago,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way I remember
+it, though why I should remember it at all I don&rsquo;t know. But that is what
+he said,&rdquo; I went on with increasing confidence. &ldquo;Eight years ago. I
+am sure of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike looked at me ponderingly, and waited until the <i>Elsinore</i> had
+fairly righted for an instant ere he took his departure down the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I think I have followed the working of his mind. I have long since learned that
+his memory of ships, officers, cargoes, gales, and disasters is remarkable. He
+is a veritable encyclop&aelig;dia of the sea. Also, it is patent that he has
+equipped himself with Sidney Waltham&rsquo;s history. As yet, he does not dream
+that Mr. Mellaire is Sidney Waltham, and he is merely wondering if Mr. Mellaire
+was a ship-mate of Sidney Waltham eighteen years ago in the ship lost off the
+Plate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, I shall never forgive Mr. Mellaire for this slip he has made.
+He should have been more careful.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap30"></a>CHAPTER XXX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+An abominable night! A wonderful night! Sleep? I suppose I did sleep, in
+catnaps, but I swear I heard every bell struck until three-thirty. Then came a
+change, an easement. No longer was it a stubborn, loggy fight against
+pressures. The <i>Elsinore</i> moved. I could feel her slip, and slide, and
+send, and soar. Whereas before she had been flung continually down to port, she
+now rolled as far to one side as to the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew what had taken place. Instead of remaining hove-to on the pampero,
+Captain West had turned tail and was running before it. This, I understood,
+meant a really serious storm, for the north-east was the last direction in
+which Captain West desired to go. But at any rate the movement, though wilder,
+was easier, and I slept. I was awakened at five by the thunder of seas that
+fell aboard, rushed down the main deck, and crashed against the cabin wall.
+Through my open door I could see water swashing up and down the hall, while
+half a foot of water creamed and curdled from under my bunk across the floor
+each time the ship rolled to starboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward brought me my coffee, and, wedged by boxes and pillows, like an
+equilibrist, I sat up and drank it. Luckily I managed to finish it in time, for
+a succession of terrific rolls emptied one of my book-shelves. Possum, crawling
+upward from my feet under the covered way of my bed, yapped with terror as the
+seas smashed and thundered and as the avalanche of books descended upon us. And
+I could not but grin when the <i>Paste Board Crown</i> smote me on the head,
+while the puppy was knocked gasping with Chesterton&rsquo;s <i>What&rsquo;s
+Wrong with the World</i>?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what do you think?&rdquo; I queried of the steward who was helping
+to set us and the books to rights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his bright slant eyes were very bright as he
+replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Many times I see like this. Me old man. Many times I see more bad. Too
+much wind, too much work. Rotten dam bad.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could guess that the scene on deck was a spectacle, and at six o&rsquo;clock,
+as gray light showed through my ports in the intervals when they were not
+submerged, I essayed the side-board of my bunk like a gymnast, captured my
+careering slippers, and shuddered as I thrust my bare feet into their chill
+sogginess. I did not wait to dress. Merely in pyjamas I headed for the poop,
+Possum wailing dismally at my desertion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a feat to travel the narrow halls. Time and again I paused and held on
+until my finger-tips hurt. In the moments of easement I made progress. Yet I
+miscalculated. The foot of the broad stairway to the chart-house rested on a
+cross-hall a dozen feet in length. Over-confidence and an unusually violent
+antic of the <i>Elsinore</i> caused the disaster. She flung down to starboard
+with such suddenness and at such a pitch that the flooring seemed to go out
+from under me and I hustled helplessly down the incline. I missed a frantic
+clutch at the newel-post, flung up my arm in time to save my face, and, most
+fortunately, whirled half about, and, still falling, impacted with my shoulder
+muscle-pad on Captain West&rsquo;s door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Youth will have its way. So will a ship in a sea. And so will a hundred and
+seventy pounds of a man. The beautiful hardwood door-panel splintered, the
+latch fetched away, and I broke the nails of the four fingers of my right hand
+in a futile grab at the flying door, marring the polished surface with four
+parallel scratches. I kept right on, erupting into Captain West&rsquo;s
+spacious room with the big brass bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown, her eyes heavy still with sleep,
+her hair glorious and for the once ungroomed, clinging in the doorway that gave
+entrance on the main cabin, met my startled gaze with an equally startled gaze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was no time for apologies. I kept right on my mad way, caught the foot
+stanchion, and was whipped around in half a circle flat upon Captain
+West&rsquo;s brass bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss West was beginning to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come right in,&rdquo; she gurgled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A score of retorts, all deliciously inadvisable, tickled my tongue, so I said
+nothing, contenting myself with holding on with my left hand while I nursed my
+stinging right hand under my arm-pit. Beyond her, across the floor of the main
+cabin, I saw the steward in pursuit of Captain West&rsquo;s Bible and a sheaf
+of Miss West&rsquo;s music. And as she gurgled and laughed at me, beholding her
+in this intimacy of storm, the thought flashed through my brain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>She is a woman</i>. <i>She is desirable</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now did she sense this fleeting, unuttered flash of mine? I know not, save that
+her laughter left her, and long conventional training asserted itself as she
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I just knew everything was adrift in father&rsquo;s room. He
+hasn&rsquo;t been in it all night. I could hear things rolling around . . .
+What is wrong? Are you hurt?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stubbed my fingers, that&rsquo;s all,&rdquo; I answered, looking at my
+broken nails and standing gingerly upright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My, that <i>was</i> a roll,&rdquo; she sympathized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; I&rsquo;d started to go upstairs,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and not to
+turn into your father&rsquo;s bed. I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve ruined the
+door.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came another series of great rolls. I sat down on the bed and held on. Miss
+West, secure in the doorway, began gurgling again, while beyond, across the
+cabin carpet, the steward shot past, embracing a small writing-desk that had
+evidently carried away from its fastenings when he seized hold of it for
+support. More seas smashed and crashed against the for&rsquo;ard wall of the
+cabin; and the steward, failing of lodgment, shot back across the carpet, still
+holding the desk from harm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking advantage of favouring spells, I managed to effect my exit and gain the
+newel-post ere the next series of rolls came. And as I clung on and waited, I
+could not forget what I had just seen. Vividly under my eyelids burned the
+picture of Miss West&rsquo;s sleep-laden eyes, her hair, and all the softness
+of her. <i>A woman and desirable</i> kept drumming in my brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I forgot all this, when, nearly at the top, I was thrown up the hill of the
+stairs as if it had suddenly become downhill. My feet flew from stair to stair
+to escape falling, and I flew, or fell, apparently upward, until, at the top, I
+hung on for dear life while the stern of the <i>Elsinore</i> flung skyward on
+some mighty surge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such antics of so huge a ship! The old stereotyped &ldquo;toy&rdquo; describes
+her; for toy she was, the sheerest splinter of a plaything in the grip of the
+elements. And yet, despite this overwhelming sensation of microscopic
+helplessness, I was aware of a sense of surety. There was the Samurai. Informed
+with his will and wisdom, the <i>Elsinore</i> was no cat&rsquo;s-paw.
+Everything was ordered, controlled. She was doing what he ordained her to do,
+and, no matter what storm-Titans bellowed about her and buffeted her, she would
+continue to do what he ordained her to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced into the chart-room. There he sat, leaned back in a screw-chair, his
+sea-booted legs, wedged against the settee, holding him in place in the most
+violent rolls. His black oilskin coat glistened in the lamplight with a myriad
+drops of ocean that advertised a recent return from deck. His sou&rsquo;wester,
+black and glistening, was like the helmet of some legendary hero. He was
+smoking a cigar, and he smiled and greeted me. But he seemed very tired and
+very old&mdash;old with wisdom, however, not weakness. The flesh of his face,
+the pink pigment quite washed and worn away, was more transparent than ever;
+and yet never was he more serene, never more the master absolute of our tiny,
+fragile world. The age that showed in him was not a matter of terrestrial
+years. It was ageless, passionless, beyond human. Never had he appeared so
+great to me, so far remote, so much a spirit visitant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he cautioned and advised me, in silver-mellow beneficent voice, as I
+essayed the venture of opening the chart-house door to gain outside. He knew
+the moment, although I never could have guessed it for myself, and gave the
+word that enabled me to win the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Water was everywhere. The <i>Elsinore</i> was rushing through a blurring whirr
+of water. Seas creamed and licked the poop-deck edge, now to starboard, now to
+port. High in the air, over-towering and perilously down-toppling,
+following-seas pursued our stern. The air was filled with spindrift like a fog
+or spray. No officer of the watch was in sight. The poop was deserted, save for
+two helmsmen in streaming oilskins under the half-shelter of the open
+wheel-house. I nodded good morning to them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One was Tom Spink, the elderly but keen and dependable English sailor. The
+other was Bill Quigley, one of a forecastle group of three that herded uniquely
+together, though the other two, Frank Fitzgibbon and Richard Giller, were in
+the second mate&rsquo;s watch. The three had proved handy with their fists, and
+clannish; they had fought pitched forecastle battles with the gangster clique
+and won a sort of neutrality of independence for themselves. They were not
+exactly sailors&mdash;Mr. Mellaire sneeringly called them the
+&ldquo;bricklayers&rdquo;&mdash;but they had successfully refused subservience
+to the gangster crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To cross the deck from the chart-house to the break of the poop was no slight
+feat, but I managed it and hung on to the railing while the wind stung my flesh
+with the flappings of my pyjamas. At this moment, and for the moment, the
+<i>Elsinore</i> righted to an even keel, and dashed along and down the
+avalanching face of a wave. And as she thus righted her deck was filled with
+water level from rail to rail. Above this flood, or knee-deep in it, Mr. Pike
+and half-a-dozen sailors were bunched on the fife-rail of the mizzen-mast. The
+carpenter, too, was there, with a couple of assistants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next roll spilled half a thousand tons of water outboard sheer over the
+starboard-rail, while all the starboard ports opened automatically and gushed
+huge streams. Then came the opposite roll to port, with a clanging shut of the
+iron doors; and a hundred tons of sea sloshed outboard across the port-rail,
+while all the iron doors on that side opened wide and gushed. And all this
+time, it must not be forgotten, the <i>Elsinore</i> was dashing ahead through
+the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only sail she carried was three upper-topsails. Not the tiniest triangle of
+headsail was on her. I had never seen her with so little wind-surface, and the
+three narrow strips of canvas, bellied to the seemingness of sheet-iron with
+the pressure of the wind, drove her before the gale at astonishing speed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the water on the deck subsided the men on the fife-rail left their refuge.
+One group, led by the redoubtable Mr. Pike, strove to capture a mass of planks
+and twisted steel. For the moment I did not recognize what it was. The
+carpenter, with two men, sprang upon Number Three hatch and worked hurriedly
+and fearfully. And I knew why Captain West had turned tail to the storm. Number
+Three hatch was a wreck. Among other things the great timber, called the
+&ldquo;strong-back,&rdquo; was broken. He had had to run, or founder. Before
+our decks were swept again I could make out the carpenter&rsquo;s emergency
+repairs. With fresh timbers he was bolting, lashing, and wedging Number Three
+hatch into some sort of tightness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the <i>Elsinore</i> dipped her port-rail under and scooped several hundred
+tons of South Atlantic, and then, immediately rolling her starboard-rail under,
+had another hundred tons of breaking sea fall in board upon her, all the men
+forsook everything and scrambled for life upon the fife-rail. In the bursting
+spray they were quite hidden; and then I saw them and counted them all as they
+emerged into view. Again they waited for the water to subside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mass of wreckage pursued by Mr. Pike and his men ground a hundred feet
+along the deck for&rsquo;ard, and, as the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> stern sank
+down in some abyss, ground back again and smashed up against the cabin wall. I
+identified this stuff as part of the bridge. That portion which spanned from
+the mizzen-mast to the &rsquo;midship-house was missing, while the starboard
+boat on the &rsquo;midship-house was a splintered mess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Watching the struggle to capture and subdue the section of bridge, I was
+reminded of Victor Hugo&rsquo;s splendid description of the sailor&rsquo;s
+battle with a ship&rsquo;s gun gone adrift in a night of storm. But there was a
+difference, I found that Hugo&rsquo;s narrative had stirred me more profoundly
+than was I stirred by this actual struggle before my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have repeatedly said that the sea makes one hard. I now realized how hard I
+had become as I stood there at the break of the poop in my wind-whipped,
+spray-soaked pyjamas. I felt no solicitude for the forecastle humans who
+struggled in peril of their lives beneath me. They did not count. Ah&mdash;I
+was even curious to see what might happen, did they get caught by those
+crashing avalanches of sea ere they could gain the safety of the fife-rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I saw. Mr. Pike, in the lead, of course, up to his waist in rushing water,
+dashed in, caught the flying wreckage with a turn of rope, and fetched it up
+short with a turn around one of the port mizzen-shrouds. The <i>Elsinore</i>
+flung down to port, and a solid wall of down-toppling green upreared a dozen
+feet above the rail. The men fled to the fife-rail. But Mr. Pike, holding his
+turn, held on, looked squarely into the wall of the wave, and received the
+downfall. He emerged, still holding by the turn the captured bridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The feeble-minded faun (the stone-deaf man) led the way to Mr. Pike&rsquo;s
+assistance, followed by Tony, the suicidal Greek. Paddy was next, and in order
+came Shorty, Henry the training-ship boy, and Nancy, last, of course, and
+looking as if he were going to execution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deck-water was no more than knee-deep, though rushing with torrential
+force, when Mr. Pike and the six men lifted the section of bridge and started
+for&rsquo;ard with it. They swayed and staggered, but managed to keep going.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carpenter saw the impending ocean-mountain first. I saw him cry to his own
+men and then to Mr. Pike ere he fled to the fife-rail. But Mr. Pike&rsquo;s men
+had no chance. Abreast of the &rsquo;midship-house, on the starboard side,
+fully fifteen feet above the rail and twenty above the deck, the sea fell on
+board. The top of the &rsquo;midship-house was swept clean of the splintered
+boat. The water, impacting against the side of the house, spouted skyward as
+high as the crojack-yard. And all this, in addition to the main bulk of the
+wave, swept and descended upon Mr. Pike and his men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They disappeared. The bridge disappeared. The <i>Elsinore</i> rolled to port
+and dipped her deck full from rail to rail. Next, she plunged down by the head,
+and all this mass of water surged forward. Through the creaming, foaming
+surface now and then emerged an arm, or a head, or a back, while cruel edges of
+jagged plank and twisted steel rods advertised that the bridge was turning over
+and over. I wondered what men were beneath it and what mauling they were
+receiving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet these men did not count. I was aware of anxiety only for Mr. Pike. He,
+in a way, socially, was of my caste and class. He and I belonged aft in the
+high place; ate at the same table. I was acutely desirous that he should not be
+hurt or killed. The rest did not matter. They were not of my world. I imagine
+the old-time skippers, on the middle passage, felt much the same toward their
+slave-cargoes in the fetid &rsquo;tween decks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a
+foaming valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward
+me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious,
+incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright,
+dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and the
+Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer and
+slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of danger so that
+his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either
+hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew augustness and pride as I gazed&mdash;pride that my eyes were blue, like
+his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with him, and with
+the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with
+the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my
+spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest&mdash;the weaklings and the
+rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods,
+and the dregs of long-conquered races&mdash;how could they count? My heels were
+iron as I gazed on them in their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten
+thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved
+them to the toil of our will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the <i>Elsinore</i> rolled to starboard and to port, while the spume
+spouted to our lower-yards and a thousand tons of South Atlantic surged across
+from rail to rail. And again all were down and under, with jagged plank and
+twisted steel overriding them. And again that amazing blond-skinned giant
+emerged, on his two legs upstanding, a broken waif like a rat in either hand.
+He forced his way through rushing, waist-high water, deposited his burdens with
+the carpenter on the fife-rail, and returned to drag Larry reeling to his feet
+and help him to the fife-rail. Out of the wash, Tony, the Greek, crawled on
+hands and knees and sank down helplessly at the fife-rail. There was nothing
+suicidal now in his mood. Struggle as he would, he could not lift himself until
+the mate, gripping his oilskin at the collar, with one hand flung him through
+the air into the carpenter&rsquo;s arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next came Shorty, his face streaming blood, one arm hanging useless, his
+sea-boots stripped from him. Mr. Pike pitched him into the fife-rail, and
+returned for the last man. It was Henry, the training-ship boy. Him I had seen,
+unstruggling, motionless, show at the surface like a drowned man and sink again
+as the flood surged aft and smashed him against the cabin. Mr. Pike,
+shoulder-deep, twice beaten to his knees and under by bursting seas, caught the
+lad, shouldered him, and carried him away for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later, in the cabin, I encountered Mr. Pike going into breakfast. He
+had changed his clothes, and he had shaved! Now how could one treat a hero such
+as he save as I treated him when I remarked off-handedly that he must have had
+a lively watch?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My,&rdquo; he answered, equally off-handedly, &ldquo;I did get a prime
+soaking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. He had had no time to see me at the poop-rail. It was merely the
+day&rsquo;s work, the ship&rsquo;s work, the MAN&rsquo;S work&mdash;all
+capitals, if you please, in MAN. I was the only one aft who knew, and I knew
+because I had chanced to see. Had I not been on the poop at that early hour no
+one aft ever would have known those gray, storm-morning deeds of his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anybody hurt?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, some of the men got wet. But no bones broke. Henry&rsquo;ll be laid
+off for a day. He got turned over in a sea and bashed his head. And
+Shorty&rsquo;s got a wrenched shoulder, I think.&mdash;But, say, we got Davis
+into the top bunk! The seas filled him full and he had to climb for it.
+He&rsquo;s all awash and wet now, and you oughta seen me praying for
+more.&rdquo; He paused and sighed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m getting old, I guess. I
+oughta wring his neck, but somehow I ain&rsquo;t got the gumption. Just the
+same, he&rsquo;ll be overside before we get in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A month&rsquo;s wages against a pound of tobacco he won&rsquo;t,&rdquo;
+I challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike slowly. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;ll tell you what I
+will do. I&rsquo;ll bet you a pound of tobacco even, or a month&rsquo;s wages
+even, that I&rsquo;ll have the pleasure of putting a sack of coal to his feet
+that never will come off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Done,&rdquo; said I.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Done,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike. &ldquo;And now I guess I&rsquo;ll get a bite
+to eat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap31"></a>CHAPTER XXXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The more I see of Miss West the more she pleases me. Explain it in terms of
+propinquity, or isolation, or whatever you will; I, at least, do not attempt
+explanation. I know only that she is a woman and desirable. And I am rather
+proud, in a way, to find that I am just a man like any man. The midnight oil,
+and the relentless pursuit I have endured in the past from the whole tribe of
+women, have not, I am glad to say, utterly spoiled me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am obsessed by that phrase&mdash;a <i>woman and desirable</i>. It beats in my
+brain, in my thought. I go out of my way to steal a glimpse of Miss West
+through a cabin door or vista of hall when she does not know I am looking. A
+woman is a wonderful thing. A woman&rsquo;s hair is wonderful. A woman&rsquo;s
+softness is a magic.&mdash;Oh, I know them for what they are, and yet this very
+knowledge makes them only the more wonderful. I know&mdash;I would stake my
+soul&mdash;that Miss West has considered me as a mate a thousand times to once
+that I have so considered her. And yet&mdash;she is a woman and desirable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I find myself continually reminded of Richard Le Gallienne&rsquo;s
+inimitable quatrain:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Were I a woman, I would all day long<br />
+Sing my own beauty in some holy song,<br />
+Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid,<br />
+And say &lsquo;I am a woman&rsquo; all day long.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me advise all philosophers suffering from world-sickness to take a long sea
+voyage with a woman like Miss West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this narrative I shall call her &ldquo;Miss West&rdquo; no more. She has
+ceased to be Miss West. She is Margaret. I do not think of her as Miss West. I
+think of her as Margaret. It is a pretty word, a woman-word. What poet must
+have created it! Margaret! I never tire of it. My tongue is enamoured of it.
+Margaret West! What a name to conjure with! A name provocative of dreams and
+mighty connotations. The history of our westward-faring race is written in it.
+There is pride in it, and dominion, and adventure, and conquest. When I murmur
+it I see visions of lean, beaked ships, of winged helmets, and heels iron-shod
+of restless men, royal lovers, royal adventurers, royal fighters. Yes, and even
+now, in these latter days when the sun consumes us, still we sit in the high
+seat of government and command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh&mdash;and by the way&mdash;she is twenty-four years old. I asked Mr. Pike
+the date of the <i>Dixie&rsquo;s</i> collision with the river steamer in San
+Francisco Bay. This occurred in 1901. Margaret was twelve years old at the
+time. This is 1913. Blessings on the head of the man who invented arithmetic!
+She is twenty-four. Her name is Margaret, and she is desirable.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are so many things to tell about. Where and how this mad voyage, with a
+mad crew, will end is beyond all surmise. But the <i>Elsinore</i> drives on,
+and day by day her history is bloodily written. And while murder is done, and
+while the whole floating drama moves toward the bleak southern ocean and the
+icy blasts of Cape Horn, I sit in the high place with the masters, unafraid, I
+am proud to say, in an ecstasy, I am proud to say, and I murmur over and over
+to <i>myself</i>&mdash;<i>Margaret</i>, <i>a woman</i>; <i>Margaret</i>, <i>and
+desirable</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to resume. It is the first day of June. Ten days have passed since the
+pampero. When the strong back on Number Three hatch was repaired Captain West
+came back on the wind, hove to, and rode out the gale. Since then, in calm, and
+fog, and damp, and storm, we have won south until to-day we are almost abreast
+of the Falklands. The coast of the Argentine lies to the West, below the
+sea-line, and some time this morning we crossed the fiftieth parallel of south
+latitude. Here begins the passage of Cape Horn, for so it is reckoned by the
+navigators&mdash;fifty south in the Atlantic to fifty south in the Pacific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet all is well with us in the matter of weather. The <i>Elsinore</i>
+slides along with favouring winds. Daily it grows colder. The great cabin stove
+roars and is white-hot, and all the connecting doors are open, so that the
+whole after region of the ship is warm and comfortable. But on the deck the air
+bites, and Margaret and I wear mittens as we promenade the poop or go
+for&rsquo;ard along the repaired bridge to see the chickens on the
+&rsquo;midship-house. The poor, wretched creatures of instinct and climate!
+Behold, as they approach the southern mid-winter of the Horn, when they have
+need of all their feathers, they proceed to moult, because, forsooth, this is
+the summer time in the land they came from. Or is moulting determined by the
+time of year they happen to be born? I shall have to look into this. Margaret
+will know.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yesterday ominous preparations were made for the passage of the Horn. All the
+braces were taken from the main deck pin-rails and geared and arranged so that
+they may be worked from the tops of the houses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, the fore-braces run to the top of the forecastle, the main-braces to the
+top of the &rsquo;midship-house, and the mizzen-braces to the poop. It is
+evident that they expect our main deck frequently to be filled with water. So
+evident is it that a laden ship when in big seas is like a log awash, that fore
+and aft, on both sides, along the deck, shoulder-high, life-lines have been
+rigged. Also, the two iron doors, on port and starboard, that open from the
+cabin directly upon the main deck, have been barricaded and caulked. Not until
+we are in the Pacific and flying north will these doors open again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while we prepare to battle around the stormiest headland in the world our
+situation on board grows darker. This morning Petro Marinkovich, a sailor in
+Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s watch, was found dead on Number One hatch. The body bore
+several knife-wounds and the throat was cut. It was palpably done by some one
+or several of the forecastle hands; but not a word can be elicited. Those who
+are guilty of it are silent, of course; while others who may chance to know are
+afraid to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before midday the body was overside with the customary sack of coal. Already
+the man is a past episode. But the humans for&rsquo;ard are tense with
+expectancy of what is to come. I strolled for&rsquo;ard this afternoon, and
+noted for the first time a distinct hostility toward me. They recognize that I
+belong with the after-guard in the high place. Oh, nothing was said; but it was
+patent by the way almost every man looked at me, or refused to look at me. Only
+Mulligan Jacobs and Charles Davis were outspoken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good riddance,&rdquo; said Mulligan Jacobs. &ldquo;The Guinea
+didn&rsquo;t have the spunk of a louse. And he&rsquo;s better off, ain&rsquo;t
+he? He lived dirty, an&rsquo; he died dirty, an&rsquo; now he&rsquo;s over
+an&rsquo; done with the whole dirty game. There&rsquo;s men on board that
+oughta wish they was as lucky as him. Theirs is still a-coming to
+&rsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean . . . ?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whatever you want to think I mean,&rdquo; the twisted wretch grinned
+malevolently into my face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charles Davis, when I peeped into his iron room, was exuberant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A pretty tale for the court in Seattle,&rdquo; he exulted.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;ll only make my case that much stronger. And wait till the
+reporters get hold of it! The hell-ship <i>Elsinore</i>! They&rsquo;ll have
+pretty pickin&rsquo;s!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen any hell-ship,&rdquo; I said coldly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve seen my treatment, ain&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he retorted.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve seen the hell I&rsquo;ve got, ain&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know you for a cold-blooded murderer,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The court will determine that, sir. All you&rsquo;ll have to do is to
+testify to facts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll testify that had I been in the mate&rsquo;s place I&rsquo;d
+have hanged you for murder.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes positively sparkled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll ask you to remember this conversation when you&rsquo;re under
+oath, sir,&rdquo; he cried eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I confess the man aroused in me a reluctant admiration. I looked about his
+mean, iron-walled room. During the pampero the place had been awash. The white
+paint was peeling off in huge scabs, and iron-rust was everywhere. The floor
+was filthy. The place stank with the stench of his sickness. His pannikin and
+unwashed eating-gear from the last meal were scattered on the floor: His
+blankets were wet, his clothing was wet. In a corner was a heterogeneous mass
+of soggy, dirty garments. He lay in the very bunk in which he had brained
+O&rsquo;Sullivan. He had been months in this vile hole. In order to live he
+would have to remain months more in it. And while his rat-like vitality won my
+admiration, I loathed and detested him in very nausea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you afraid?&rdquo; I demanded. &ldquo;What makes you think
+you will last the voyage? Don&rsquo;t you know bets are being made that you
+won&rsquo;t?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So interested was he that he seemed to prick up his ears as he raised on his
+elbow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;re too scared to tell me about them bets,&rdquo; he
+sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ve bet you&rsquo;ll last,&rdquo; I assured him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That means there&rsquo;s others that bet I won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he
+rattled on hastily. &ldquo;An&rsquo; that means that there&rsquo;s men aboard
+the <i>Elsinore</i> right now financially interested in my taking-off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment the steward, bound aft from the galley, paused in the doorway
+and listened, grinning. As for Charles Davis, the man had missed his vocation.
+He should have been a land-lawyer, not a sea-lawyer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well, sir,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you testify to
+that in Seattle, unless you&rsquo;re lying to a helpless sick man, or unless
+you&rsquo;ll perjure yourself under oath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got what he was seeking, for he stung me to retort:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;ll testify. Though I tell you candidly that I don&rsquo;t
+think I&rsquo;ll win my bet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You loose &rsquo;m bet sure,&rdquo; the steward broke in, nodding his
+head. &ldquo;That fellow him die damn soon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bet with&rsquo;m, sir,&rdquo; Davis challenged me. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a
+straight tip from me, an&rsquo; a regular cinch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole situation was so gruesome and grotesque, and I had been swept into it
+so absurdly, that for the moment I did not know what to do or say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s good money,&rdquo; Davis urged. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t
+goin&rsquo; to die. Look here, steward, how much you want to bet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five dollar, ten dollar, twenty dollar,&rdquo; the steward answered,
+with a shoulder-shrug that meant that the sum was immaterial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well then, steward. Mr. Pathurst covers your money, say for twenty.
+Is it a go, sir?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you bet with him yourself?&rdquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure I will, sir. Here, you steward, I bet you twenty even I don&rsquo;t
+die.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I bet you twenty to ten,&rdquo; the sick man insisted.
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s eatin&rsquo; you, anyway?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You live, me lose, me pay you,&rdquo; the steward explained. &ldquo;You
+die, I win, you dead; no pay me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still grinning and shaking his head, he went his way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just the same, sir, it&rsquo;ll be rich testimony,&rdquo; Davis
+chuckled. &ldquo;An&rsquo; can&rsquo;t you see the reporters eatin&rsquo; it
+up?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Asiatic clique in the cook&rsquo;s room has its suspicions about the death
+of Marinkovich, but will not voice them. Beyond shakings of heads and dark
+mutterings, I can get nothing out of Wada or the steward. When I talked with
+the sail-maker, he complained that his injured hand was hurting him and that he
+would be glad when he could get to the surgeons in Seattle. As for the murder,
+when pressed by me, he gave me to understand that it was no affair of the
+Japanese or Chinese on board, and that he was a Japanese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Louis, the Chinese half-caste with the Oxford accent, was more frank. I
+caught him aft from the galley on a trip to the lazarette for provisions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are of a different race, sir, from these men,&rdquo; he said;
+&ldquo;and our safest policy is to leave them alone. We have talked it over,
+and we have nothing to say, sir, nothing whatever to say. Consider my position.
+I work for&rsquo;ard in the galley; I am in constant contact with the sailors;
+I even sleep in their section of the ship; and I am one man against many. The
+only other countryman I have on board is the steward, and he sleeps aft. Your
+servant and the two sail-makers are Japanese. They are only remotely kin to us,
+though we&rsquo;ve agreed to stand together and apart from whatever
+happens.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is Shorty,&rdquo; I said, remembering Mr. Pike&rsquo;s diagnosis
+of his mixed nationality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we do not recognize him, sir,&rdquo; Louis answered suavely.
+&ldquo;He is Portuguese; he is Malay; he is Japanese, true; but he is a
+mongrel, sir, a mongrel and a bastard. Also, he is a fool. And please, sir,
+remember that we are very few, and that our position compels us to
+neutrality.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But your outlook is gloomy,&rdquo; I persisted. &ldquo;How do you think
+it will end?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall arrive in Seattle most probably, some of us. But I can tell you
+this, sir: I have lived a long life on the sea, but I have never seen a crew
+like this. There are few sailors in it; there are bad men in it; and the rest
+are fools and worse. You will notice I mention no names, sir; but there are men
+on board whom I do not care to antagonize. I am just Louis, the cook. I do my
+work to the best of my ability, and that is all, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And will Charles Davis arrive in Seattle?&rdquo; I asked, changing the
+topic in acknowledgment of his right to be reticent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I do not think so, sir,&rdquo; he answered, although his eyes
+thanked me for my courtesy. &ldquo;The steward tells me you have bet that he
+will. I think, sir, it is a poor bet. We are about to go around the Horn. I
+have been around it many times. This is midwinter, and we are going from east
+to west. Davis&rsquo; room will be awash for weeks. It will never be dry. A
+strong healthy man confined in it could well die of the hardship. And Davis is
+far from well. In short, sir, I know his condition, and he is in a shocking
+state. Surgeons might prolong his life, but here in a wind-jammer it is
+shortened very rapidly. I have seen many men die at sea. I know, sir. Thank
+you, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the Eurasian Chinese-Englishman bowed himself away.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap32"></a>CHAPTER XXXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Things are worse than I fancied. Here are two episodes within the last
+seventy-two hours. Mr. Mellaire, for instance, is going to pieces. He cannot
+stand the strain of being on the same vessel with the man who has sworn to
+avenge Captain Somers&rsquo;s murder, especially when that man is the
+redoubtable Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For several days Margaret and I have been remarking the second mate&rsquo;s
+bloodshot eyes and pain-lined face and wondering if he were sick. And to-day
+the secret leaked out. Wada does not like Mr. Mellaire, and this morning, when
+he brought me breakfast, I saw by the wicked, gleeful gleam in his almond eyes
+that he was spilling over with some fresh, delectable ship&rsquo;s gossip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For several days, I learned, he and the steward have been solving a cabin
+mystery. A gallon can of wood alcohol, standing on a shelf in the after-room,
+had lost quite a portion of its contents. They compared notes and then made of
+themselves a Sherlock Holmes and a Doctor Watson. First, they gauged the daily
+diminution of alcohol. Next they gauged it several times daily, and learned
+that the diminution, whenever it occurred, was first apparent immediately after
+meal-time. This focussed their attention on two suspects&mdash;the second mate
+and the carpenter, who alone sat in the after-room. The rest was easy. Whenever
+Mr. Mellaire arrived ahead of the carpenter more alcohol was missing. When they
+arrived and departed together, the alcohol was undisturbed. The carpenter was
+never alone in the room. The syllogism was complete. And now the steward stores
+the alcohol under his bunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But wood alcohol is deadly poison. What a constitution this man of fifty must
+have! Small wonder his eyes have been bloodshot. The great wonder is that the
+stuff did not destroy him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have not whispered a word of this to Margaret; nor shall I whisper it. I
+should like to put Mr. Pike on his guard; and yet I know that the revealing of
+Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s identity would precipitate another killing. And still we
+drive south, close-hauled on the wind, toward the inhospitable tip of the
+continent. To-day we are south of a line drawn between the Straits of Magellan
+and the Falklands, and to-morrow, if the breeze holds, we shall pick up the
+coast of Tierra del Fuego close to the entrance of the Straits of Le Maire,
+through which Captain West intends to pass if the wind favours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other episode occurred last night. Mr. Pike says nothing, yet he knows the
+crew situation. I have been watching some time now, ever since the death of
+Marinkovich; and I am certain that Mr. Pike never ventures on the main deck
+after dark. Yet he holds his tongue, confides in no man, and plays out the
+bitter perilous game as a commonplace matter of course and all in the
+day&rsquo;s work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now to the episode. Shortly after the close of the second dog-watch last
+evening I went for&rsquo;ard to the chickens on the &rsquo;midship-house on an
+errand for Margaret. I was to make sure that the steward had carried out her
+orders. The canvas covering to the big chicken coop had to be down, the
+ventilation insured, and the kerosene stove burning properly. When I had proved
+to my satisfaction the dependableness of the steward, and just as I was on the
+verge of returning to the poop, I was drawn aside by the weird crying of
+penguins in the darkness and by the unmistakable noise of a whale blowing not
+far away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had climbed around the end of the port boat, and was standing there, quite
+hidden in the darkness, when I heard the unmistakable age-lag step of the mate
+proceed along the bridge from the poop. It was a dim starry night, and the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, in the calm ocean under the lee of Tierra del Fuego, was
+slipping gently and prettily through the water at an eight-knot clip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike paused at the for&rsquo;ard end of the housetop and stood in a
+listening attitude. From the main deck below, near Number Two hatch, across the
+mumbling of various voices, I could recognize Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert
+Rhine&mdash;the three gangsters. But Steve Roberts, the cow-boy, was also
+there, as was Mr. Mellaire, both of whom belonged in the other watch and should
+have been turned in; for, at midnight, it would be their watch on deck.
+Especially wrong was Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s presence, holding social converse
+with members of the crew&mdash;a breach of ship ethics most grievous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have always been cursed with curiosity. Always have I wanted to know; and, on
+the <i>Elsinore</i>, I have already witnessed many a little scene that was a
+clean-cut dramatic gem. So I did not discover myself, but lurked behind the
+boat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The men still talked. I was tantalized
+by the crying of the penguins, and by the whale, evidently playful, which came
+so close that it spouted and splashed a biscuit-toss away. I saw Mr.
+Pike&rsquo;s head turn at the sound; he glanced squarely in my direction, but
+did not see me. Then he returned to listening to the mumble of voices from
+beneath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now whether Mulligan Jacobs just happened along, or whether he was deliberately
+scouting, I do not know. I tell what occurred. Up-and-down the side of the
+&rsquo;midship-house is a ladder. And up this ladder Mulligan Jacobs climbed so
+noiselessly that I was not aware of his presence until I heard Mr. Pike snarl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What the hell you doin&rsquo; here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I saw Mulligan Jacobs in the gloom, within two yards of the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s it to you?&rdquo; Mulligan Jacobs snarled back. The voices
+below hushed. I knew every man stood there tense and listening. No; the
+philosophers have not yet explained Mulligan Jacobs. There is something more to
+him than the last word has said in any book. He stood there in the darkness, a
+fragile creature with curvature of the spine, facing alone the first mate, and
+he was not afraid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike cursed him with fearful, unrepeatable words, and again demanded what
+he was doing there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I left me plug of tobacco here when I was coiling down last,&rdquo; said
+the little twisted man&mdash;no; he did not say it. He spat it out like so much
+venom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get off of here, or I&rsquo;ll throw you off, you and your
+tobacco,&rdquo; raged the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mulligan Jacobs lurched closer to Mr. Pike, and in the gloom and with the roll
+of the ship swayed in the other&rsquo;s face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By God, Jacobs!&rdquo; was all the mate could say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You old stiff,&rdquo; was all the terrible little cripple could retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike gripped him by the collar and swung him in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you goin&rsquo; down?&mdash;or am I goin&rsquo; to throw you
+down?&rdquo; the mate demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot describe their manner of utterance. It was that of wild beasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t ate outa your hand yet, have I?&rdquo; was the reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike tried to say something, still holding the cripple suspended, but he
+could do no more than strangle in his impotence of rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re an old stiff, an old stiff, an old stiff,&rdquo; Mulligan
+Jacobs chanted, equally incoherent and unimaginative with brutish fury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say it again and over you go,&rdquo; the mate managed to enunciate
+thickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re an old stiff,&rdquo; gasped Mulligan Jacobs. He was flung.
+He soared through the air with the might of the fling, and even as he soared
+and fell through the darkness he reiterated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Old stiff! Old stiff!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fell among the men on Number Two hatch, and there were confusion and
+movement below, and groans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike paced up and down the narrow house and gritted his teeth. Then he
+paused. He leaned his arms on the bridge-rail, rested his head on his arms for
+a full minute, then groaned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.&rdquo; That was all. Then he went
+aft, slowly, dragging his feet along the bridge.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap33"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The days grow gray. The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at meridian, it
+is lower in the northern sky. All the old stars have long since gone, and it
+would seem the sun is following them. The world&mdash;the only world I
+know&mdash;has been left behind far there to the north, and the hill of the
+earth is between it and us. This sad and solitary ocean, gray and cold, is the
+end of all things, the falling-off place where all things cease. Only it grows
+colder, and grayer, and penguins cry in the night, and huge amphibians moan and
+slubber, and great albatrosses, gray with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel and
+veer.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Land ho!&rdquo; was the cry yesterday morning. I shivered as I gazed at
+this, the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago. There was no sun, and
+the morning was damp and cold with a brisk wind that penetrated any garment.
+The deck thermometer marked 30&mdash;two degrees below freezing-point; and now
+and then easy squalls of snow swept past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of the land that was to be seen was snow. Long, low chains of peaks,
+snow-covered, arose out of the ocean. As we drew closer, there were no signs of
+life. It was a sheer, savage, bleak, forsaken land. By eleven, off the entrance
+of Le Maire Straits, the squalls ceased, the wind steadied, and the tide began
+to make through in the direction we desired to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West did not hesitate. His orders to Mr. Pike were quick and tranquil.
+The man at the wheel altered the course, while both watches sprang aloft to
+shake out royals and skysails. And yet Captain West knew every inch of the risk
+he took in this graveyard of ships.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we entered the narrow strait, under full sail and gripped by a tremendous
+tide, the rugged headlands of Tierra del Fuego dashed by with dizzying
+swiftness. Close we were to them, and close we were to the jagged coast of
+Staten Island on the opposite shore. It was here, in a wild bight, between two
+black and precipitous walls of rock where even the snow could find no lodgment,
+that Captain West paused in a casual sweep of his glasses and gazed steadily at
+one place. I picked the spot up with my own glasses and was aware of an instant
+chill as I saw the four masts of a great ship sticking out of the water.
+Whatever craft it was, it was as large as the <i>Elsinore</i>, and it had been
+but recently wrecked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One of the German nitrate ships,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike. Captain West
+nodded, still studying the wreck, then said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She looks quite deserted. Just the same, Mr. Pike, send several of your
+best-sighted sailors aloft, and keep a good lookout yourself. There may be some
+survivors ashore trying to signal us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But we sailed on, and no signals were seen. Mr. Pike was delighted with our
+good fortune. He was guilty of walking up and down, rubbing his hands and
+chuckling to himself. Not since 1888, he told me, had he been through the
+Straits of Le Maire. Also, he said that he knew of shipmasters who had made
+forty voyages around the Horn and had never once had the luck to win through
+the straits. The regular passage is far to the east around Staten Island, which
+means a loss of westing, and here, at the tip of the world, where the great
+west wind, unobstructed by any land, sweeps round and around the narrow girth
+of earth, westing is the thing that has to be fought for mile by mile and inch
+by inch. The Sailing Directions advise masters on the Horn passage: <i>Make
+Westing</i>. <i>Whatever you do</i>, <i>make westing</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When we emerged from the straits in the early afternoon the same steady breeze
+continued, and in the calm water under the lee of Tierra del Fuego, which
+extends south-westerly to the Horn, we slipped along at an eight-knot clip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was beside himself. He could scarcely tear himself from the deck when
+it was his watch below. He chuckled, rubbed his hands, and incessantly hummed
+snatches from the Twelfth Mass. Also, he was voluble.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To-morrow morning we&rsquo;ll be up with the Horn. We&rsquo;ll shave it
+by a dozen or fifteen miles. Think of it! We&rsquo;ll just steal around! I
+never had such luck, and never expected to. Old girl <i>Elsinore</i>,
+you&rsquo;re rotten for&rsquo;ard, but the hand of God is at your helm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, under the weather cloth, I came upon him talking to himself. It was more
+a prayer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If only she don&rsquo;t pipe up,&rdquo; he kept repeating. &ldquo;If
+only she don&rsquo;t pipe up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire was quite different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It never happens,&rdquo; he told me. &ldquo;No ship ever went around
+like this. You watch her come. She always comes a-smoking out of the
+sou&rsquo;west.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But can&rsquo;t a vessel ever steal around?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The odds are mighty big against it, sir,&rdquo; he answered.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give you a line on them. I&rsquo;ll wager even, sir, just a
+nominal bet of a pound of tobacco, that inside twenty-four hours we&rsquo;ll be
+hove to under upper-topsails. I&rsquo;ll wager ten pounds to five that
+we&rsquo;re not west of the Horn a week from now; and, fifty to fifty being the
+passage, twenty pounds to five that two weeks from now we&rsquo;re not up with
+fifty in the Pacific.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Captain West, the perils of Le Maire behind, he sat below, his slippered
+feet stretched before him, smoking a cigar. He had nothing to say whatever,
+although Margaret and I were jubilant and dared duets through all of the second
+dog-watch.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this morning, in a smooth sea and gentle breeze, the Horn bore almost due
+north of us not more than six miles away. Here we were, well abreast and
+reeling off westing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What price tobacco this morning?&rdquo; I quizzed Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Going up,&rdquo; he came back. &ldquo;Wish I had a thousand bets like
+the one with you, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced about at sea and sky and gauged the speed of our way by the foam, but
+failed to see anything that warranted his remark. It was surely fine weather,
+and the steward, in token of the same, was trying to catch fluttering Cape
+pigeons with a bent pin on a piece of thread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For&rsquo;ard, on the poop, I encountered Mr. Pike. It <i>was</i> an encounter,
+for his salutation was a grunt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;re going right along,&rdquo; I ventured cheerily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made no reply, but turned and stared into the gray south-west with an
+expression sourer than any I had ever seen on his face. He mumbled something I
+failed to catch, and, on my asking him to repeat it, he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s breeding weather. Can&rsquo;t you see it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What d&rsquo;ye think we&rsquo;re taking off the kites for?&rdquo; he
+growled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I looked aloft. The skysails were already furled; men were furling the royals;
+and the topgallant-yards were running down while clewlines and buntlines bagged
+the canvas. Yet, if anything, our northerly breeze fanned even more gently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bless me if I can see any weather,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then go and take a look at the barometer,&rdquo; he grunted, as he
+turned on his heel and swung away from me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the chart-room was Captain West, pulling on his long sea-boots. That would
+have told me had there been no barometer, though the barometer was eloquent
+enough of itself. The night before it had stood at 30.10. It was now 28.64.
+Even in the pampero it had not been so low as that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The usual Cape Horn programme,&rdquo; Captain West smiled to me, as he
+stood up in all his lean and slender gracefulness and reached for his long
+oilskin coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still I could scarcely believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it very far away?&rdquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head, and forebore in the act of speaking to lift his hand for me
+to listen. The <i>Elsinore</i> rolled uneasily, and from without came the soft
+and hollow thunder of sails emptying themselves against the masts and gear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had chatted a bare five minutes, when again he lifted his head. This time
+the <i>Elsinore</i> heeled over slightly and remained heeled over, while the
+sighing whistle of a rising breeze awoke in the rigging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s beginning to make,&rdquo; he said, in the good old
+Anglo-Saxon of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then I heard Mr. Pike snarling out orders, and in my heart discovered a
+growing respect for Cape Horn&mdash;Cape Stiff, as the sailors call it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later we were hove to on the port tack under upper-topsails and
+foresail. The wind had come out of the south-west, and our leeway was setting
+us down upon the land. Captain West gave orders to the mate to stand by to wear
+ship. Both watches had been taking in sail, so that both watches were on deck
+for the manoeuvre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was astounding, the big sea that had arisen in so short a time. The wind was
+blowing a gale that ever, in recurring gusts, increased upon itself. Nothing
+was visible a hundred yards away. The day had become black-gray. In the cabin
+lamps were burning. The view from the poop, along the length of the great
+labouring ship, was magnificent. Seas burst and surged across her weather-rail
+and kept her deck half filled, despite the spouting ports and gushing scuppers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On each of the two houses and on the poop the ship&rsquo;s complement, all in
+oilskins, was in groups. For&rsquo;ard, Mr. Mellaire had charge. Mr. Pike took
+charge of the &rsquo;midship-house and the poop. Captain West strolled up and
+down, saw everything, said nothing; for it was the mate&rsquo;s affair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Mr. Pike ordered the wheel hard up, he slacked off all the mizzen-yards,
+and followed it with a partial slacking of the main-yards, so that the
+after-pressures were eased. The foresail and fore-lower- and-upper-topsails
+remained flat in order to pay the head off before the wind. All this took time.
+The men were slow, not strong, and without snap. They reminded me of dull oxen
+by the way they moved and pulled. And the gale, ever snorting harder, now
+snorted diabolically. Only at intervals could I glimpse the group on top the
+for&rsquo;ard-house. Again and again, leaning to it and holding their heads
+down, the men on the &rsquo;midship-house were obliterated by the drive of
+crested seas that burst against the rail, spouted to the lower-yards, and swept
+in horizontal volumes across to leeward. And Mr. Pike, like an enormous spider
+in a wind-tossed web, went back and forth along the slender bridge that was
+itself a shaken thread in the blast of the storm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So tremendous were the gusts that for the time the <i>Elsinore</i> refused to
+answer. She lay down to it; she was swept and racked by it; but her head did
+not pay off before it, and all the while we drove down upon that bitter, iron
+coast. And the world was black-gray, and violent, and very cold, with the
+flying spray freezing to ice in every lodgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We waited. The groups of men, head down to it, waited. Mr. Pike, restless,
+angry, his blue eyes as bitter as the cold, his mouth as much a-snarl as the
+snarl of the elements with which he fought, waited. The Samurai waited,
+tranquil, casual, remote. And Cape Horn waited, there on our lee, for the bones
+of our ship and us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> bow paid off. The angle of the beat of the
+gale changed, and soon, with dreadful speed, we were dashing straight before it
+and straight toward the rocks we could not see. But all doubt was over. The
+success of the manoeuvre was assured. Mr. Mellaire, informed by messenger along
+the bridge from Mr. Pike, slacked off the head-yards. Mr. Pike, his eye on the
+helmsman, his hand signalling the order, had the wheel put over to port to
+check the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> rush into the wind as she came up on the
+starboard tack. All was activity. Main- and mizzen-yards were braced up, and
+the <i>Elsinore</i>, snugged down and hove to, had a lee of thousands of miles
+of Southern Ocean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all this had been accomplished in the stamping ground of storm, at the end
+of the world, by a handful of wretched weaklings, under the drive of two strong
+mates, with behind them the placid will of the Samurai.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It had taken thirty minutes to wear ship, and I had learned how the best of
+shipmasters can lose their ships without reproach. Suppose the <i>Elsinore</i>
+had persisted in her refusal to payoff? Suppose anything had carried away? And
+right here enters Mr. Pike. It is his task ever to see that every rope and
+block and all the myriad other things in the vast and complicated gear of the
+<i>Elsinore</i> are in strength not to carry away. Always have the masters of
+our race required henchmen like Mr. Pike, and it seems the race has well
+supplied those henchmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ere I went below I heard Captain West tell Mr. Pike that while both watches
+were on deck it would be just as well to put a reef in the foresail before they
+furled it. The mainsail and the crojack being off, I could see the men black on
+the fore-yard. For half-an-hour I lingered, watching them. They seemed to make
+no progress with the reef. Mr. Mellaire was with them, having direct
+supervision of the job, while Mr. Pike, on the poop, growled and grumbled and
+spat endless blasphemies into the flying air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two watches on a single yardarm and unable to put a reef in a
+handkerchief like that!&rdquo; he snorted. &ldquo;What&rsquo;ll it be if
+we&rsquo;re off here a month?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A month!&rdquo; I cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A month isn&rsquo;t anything for Cape Stiff,&rdquo; he said grimly.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been off here seven weeks and then turned tail and run around
+the other way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Around the world?&rdquo; I gasped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was the only way to get to &rsquo;Frisco,&rdquo; he answered.
+&ldquo;The Horn&rsquo;s the Horn, and there&rsquo;s no summer seas that
+I&rsquo;ve ever noticed in this neighbourhood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My fingers were numb and I was chilled through when I took a last look at the
+wretched men on the fore-yard and went below to warm up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little later, as I went in to table, through a cabin port I stole a look
+for&rsquo;ard between seas and saw the men still struggling on the freezing
+yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The four of us were at table, and it was very comfortable, in spite of the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> violent antics. The room was warm. The storm-racks on
+the table kept each dish in its place. The steward served and moved about with
+ease and apparent unconcern, although I noticed an occasional anxious gleam in
+his eyes when he poised some dish at a moment when the ship pitched and flung
+with unusual wildness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now and again I thought of the poor devils on the yard. Well, they belonged
+there by right, just as we belonged here by right in this oasis of the cabin. I
+looked at Mr. Pike and wagered to myself that half-a-dozen like him could
+master that stubborn foresail. As for the Samurai, I was convinced that alone,
+not moving from his seat, by a tranquil exertion of will, he could accomplish
+the same thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lighted sea-lamps swung and leaped in their gimbals, ever battling with the
+dancing shadows in the murky gray. The wood-work creaked and groaned. The
+jiggermast, a huge cylinder of hollow steel that perforated the apartment
+through deck above and floor beneath, was hideously vocal with the storm. Far
+above, taut ropes beat against it so that it clanged like a boiler-shop. There
+was a perpetual thunder of seas falling on our deck and crash of water against
+our for&rsquo;ard wall; while the ten thousand ropes and gears aloft bellowed
+and screamed as the storm smote them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet all this was from without. Here, at this well-appointed table, was no
+draught nor breath of wind, no drive of spray nor wash of sea. We were in the
+heart of peace in the midmost centre of the storm. Margaret was in high
+spirits, and her laughter vied with the clang of the jiggermast. Mr. Pike was
+gloomy, but I knew him well enough to attribute his gloom, not to the elements,
+but to the inefficients futilely freezing on the yard. As for me, I looked
+about at the four of us&mdash;blue-eyed, gray-eyed, all fair-skinned and royal
+blond&mdash;and somehow it seemed that I had long since lived this, and that
+with me and in me were all my ancestors, and that their lives and memories were
+mine, and that all this vexation of the sea and air and labouring ship was of
+old time and a thousand times before.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap34"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How are you for a climb?&rdquo; Margaret asked me, shortly after we had
+left the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou&rsquo;wester, and
+sea-boots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen you with a foot above the deck since we
+sailed,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;Have you a good head?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged, and clapped
+my hands for Wada.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you?&rdquo; she cried eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you let me lead,&rdquo; I answered airily, &ldquo;and if you will
+promise to hold on tight. Whither away?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Into the top of the jigger. It&rsquo;s the easiest. As for holding on,
+please remember that I have often done it. It is with you the doubt
+rests.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; I retorted; &ldquo;do you lead then. I shall hold on
+tight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen many a landsman funk it,&rdquo; she teased. &ldquo;There are
+no lubber-holes in our tops.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And most likely I shall,&rdquo; I agreed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never been
+aloft in my life, and since there is no hole for a lubber.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I extended my
+arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre. The universe was very
+immediately about us. It blanketed us in storming wind and flying spray and
+grayness. Our main deck was impassable, and the relief of the wheel came aft
+along the bridge. It was two o&rsquo;clock, and for over two hours the frozen
+wretches had laid out upon the fore-yard. They were still there, weak, feeble,
+hopeless. Captain West, stepping out in the lee of the chart-house, gazed at
+them for several minutes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have to give up that reef,&rdquo; he said to Mr. Pike.
+&ldquo;Just make the sail fast. Better put on double gaskets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as spray and
+the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for&rsquo;ard along the bridge
+to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-masted ship that could not reef
+a foresail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is true. They could not do it, despite their willingness, for this I have
+learned: <i>the men do their weak best whenever the order is given to shorten
+sail</i>. It must be that they are afraid. They lack the iron of Mr. Pike, the
+wisdom and the iron of Captain West. Always, have I noticed, with all the
+alacrity of which they are capable, do they respond to any order to shorten
+down. That is why they are for&rsquo;ard, in that pigsty of a forecastle,
+because they lack the iron. Well, I can say only this: If nothing else could
+have prevented the funk hinted at by Margaret, the sorry spectacle of these
+ironless, spineless creatures was sufficient safeguard. How could I funk in the
+face of their weakness&mdash;I, who lived aft in the high place?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the pin-rail at
+the foot of the weather jigger-rigging. But it was merely the recognition of a
+courtesy on her part, for the next moment she released her mittened hand from
+mine, swung boldly outboard into the face of the gale, and around against the
+ratlines. Then she began to climb. I followed, almost unaware of the
+ticklishness of the exploit to a tyro, so buoyed up was I by her example and by
+my scorn of the weaklings for&rsquo;ard. Where men could go, I could go. What
+men could do, I could do. And no daughter of the Samurai could out-game me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet it was slow work. In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts one was
+pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging. At such times, so
+great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor foot. Also, there was no
+need for holding on. As I have said, one was pinned against the rigging by the
+wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me, until a
+fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the sea, in which case
+the result would be frigid drowning. And still Margaret climbed. Without pause
+she went out under the overhanging platform of the top, shifted her holds to
+the rigging that went aloft from it, and swung around this rigging, easily,
+carelessly, timing the action to the roll, and stood safely upon the top.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I followed. I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my back to
+the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my hands for holds I
+could not see. I was in an ecstasy. I could dare anything. Had she sprung into
+the air, stretched out her arms, and soared away on the breast of the gale, I
+should have unhesitatingly followed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view, I could
+see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes. And as I swung around the
+rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in her eyes that was quickly
+routed by petulance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;ve done this sort of thing before,&rdquo; she reproached,
+calling loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again. She nodded and
+smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-swirled space from the
+edge of the top. I sat beside her, looking down into the snow that hid the deck
+while it exaggerated the depth out of which we had climbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air on a steel
+stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into snow. We had come to
+the tip of the world, and even that tip had ceased to be. But no. Out of the
+snow, down wind, with motionless wings, driving fully eighty or ninety miles an
+hour, appeared a huge albatross. He must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip
+to wing-tip. He had seen his danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on
+the blast, he carelessly veered clear of collision. His head and neck were
+rimed with age or frost&mdash;we could not tell which&mdash;and his bright
+bead-eye noted us as he passed and whirled away on a great circle into the snow
+to leeward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret&rsquo;s hand shot out to mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It alone was worth the climb!&rdquo; she cried. And then the
+<i>Elsinore</i> flung down, and Margaret&rsquo;s hand clutched tighter for
+holding, while from the hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great
+west wind drift upon our decks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp quickness,
+and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship beneath us&mdash;the
+main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-head buried in a bursting
+sea, the lookout, stationed for very life back on top the for&rsquo;ard-house,
+hanging on, head down, to the wind-drive of ocean, and, directly under us, the
+streaming poop and Mr. Mellaire, with a handful of men, rigging relieving
+tackles on the tiller. And we saw the Samurai emerge in the lee of the
+chart-house, swaying with casual surety on the mad deck, as he spoke what must
+have been instructions to Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several hundred
+yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy gray-beards, sixty feet
+from trough to crest, leapt out of the windward murky gray, and in unending
+procession rushed upon the <i>Elsinore</i>, one moment overtoppling her slender
+frailness, the next moment splashing a hundred tons of water on her deck and
+flinging her skyward as they passed beneath and foamed and crested from sight
+in the murky gray to leeward. And the great albatrosses veered and circled
+about us, beating up into the bitter violence of the gale and sweeping grandly
+away before it far faster than it blew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent, questioning eyes.
+With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew aside the ear-flap of her
+sou&rsquo;wester and shouted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
+fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites my nostrils,
+the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening. I know, now, that my
+forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in their own day. With them I have
+raided English coasts, dared the Pillars of Hercules, forayed the
+Mediterranean, and sat in the high place of government over the soft sun-warm
+peoples. I am Hengist and Horsa; I am of the ancient heroes, even legendary to
+them. I have bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere
+ever the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore,
+slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on
+the walls of deep-buried caves&mdash;ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side
+with my brother-cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our cheeks,
+and the <i>Elsinore</i> flung over and down as if she would never rise again,
+while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying arc. Margaret released
+a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my ear-flap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know anything about it,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;It sounds
+like poetry. But I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it
+aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back the frost
+and night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the books?&rdquo; she queried maliciously, as we prepared to
+descend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools that
+wrote them,&rdquo; I replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as she swung
+out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she caught footholds beneath
+her which she could not see, and passed out of my sight under the perilous
+overhang of the top.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap35"></a>CHAPTER XXXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What price tobacco?&rdquo; was Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s greeting, when I
+came on deck this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle
+from sixty hours of being tossed about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind had fallen to a dead calm toward morning, and the Elsinore, her
+several spread sails booming and slatting, rolled more miserably than ever. Mr.
+Mellaire pointed for&rsquo;ard of our starboard beam. I could make out a bleak
+land of white and jagged peaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Staten Island, the easterly end of it,&rdquo; said Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I knew that we were in the position of a vessel just rounding Staten Island
+preliminary to bucking the Horn. And, yet, four days ago, we had run through
+the Straits of Le Maire and stolen along toward the Horn. Three days ago we had
+been well abreast of the Horn and even a few miles past. And here we were now,
+starting all over again and far in the rear of where we had originally started.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The condition of the men is truly wretched. During the gale the forecastle was
+washed out twice. This means that everything in it was afloat and that every
+article of clothing, including mattresses and blankets, is wet and will remain
+wet in this bitter weather until we are around the Horn and well up in the
+good-weather latitudes. The same is true of the &rsquo;midship-house. Every
+room in it, with the exception of the cook&rsquo;s and the sail-makers&rsquo;
+(which open for&rsquo;ard on Number Two hatch), is soaking. And they have no
+fires in their rooms with which to dry things out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I peeped into Charles Davis&rsquo;s room. It was terrible. He grinned to me and
+nodded his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just as well O&rsquo;Sullivan wasn&rsquo;t here, sir,&rdquo;
+he said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;d a-drowned in the lower bunk. And I want to tell you
+I was doing some swimmin&rsquo; before I could get into the top one. And salt
+water&rsquo;s bad for my sores. I oughtn&rsquo;t to be in a hole like this in
+Cape Horn weather. Look at the ice, there, on the floor. It&rsquo;s below
+freezin&rsquo; right now in this room, and my blankets are wet, and I&rsquo;m a
+sick man, as any man can tell that&rsquo;s got a nose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you&rsquo;d been decent to the mate you might have got decent
+treatment in return,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh!&rdquo; he sneered. &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t think you can lose me,
+sir. I can grow fat on this sort of stuff. Why, sir, when I think of the court
+doin&rsquo;s in Seattle I just couldn&rsquo;t die. An&rsquo; if you&rsquo;ll
+listen to me, sir, you&rsquo;ll cover the steward&rsquo;s money. You
+can&rsquo;t lose. I&rsquo;m advisin&rsquo; you, sir, because you&rsquo;re a
+sort of decent sort. Anybody that bets on my going over the side is a sure
+loser.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How could you dare ship on a voyage like this in your condition?&rdquo;
+I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Condition?&rdquo; he queried with a fine assumption of innocence.
+&ldquo;Why, that is why I did ship. I was in tiptop shape when I sailed. All
+this come out on me afterward. You remember seein&rsquo; me aloft, an&rsquo; up
+to my neck in water. And I trimmed coal below, too. A sick man couldn&rsquo;t
+do it. And remember, sir, you&rsquo;ll have to testify to how I did my duty at
+the beginning before I took down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet with you myself if you think I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to
+die,&rdquo; he called after me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already the sailors show marks of the hardship they are enduring. It is
+surprising, in so short a time, how lean their faces have grown, how lined and
+seamed. They must dry their underclothing with their body heat. Their outer
+garments, under their oilskins, are soggy. And yet, paradoxically, despite
+their lean, drawn faces, they have grown very stout. Their walk is a waddle,
+and they bulge with seeming corpulency. This is due to the amount of clothing
+they have on. I noticed Larry, to-day, had on two vests, two coats, and an
+overcoat, with his oilskin outside of that. They are elephantine in their gait
+for, in addition to everything else, they have wrapped their feet, outside
+their sea-boots, with gunny sacking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It <i>is</i> cold, although the deck thermometer stood at thirty-three to-day
+at noon. I had Wada weigh the clothing I wear on deck. Omitting oilskins and
+boots, it came to eighteen pounds. And yet I am not any too warm in all this
+gear when the wind is blowing. How sailors, after having once experienced the
+Horn, can ever sign on again for a voyage around is beyond me. It but serves to
+show how stupid they must be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I feel sorry for Henry, the training-ship boy. He is more my own kind, and some
+day he will make a henchman of the afterguard and a mate like Mr. Pike. In the
+meantime, along with Buckwheat, the other boy who berths in the
+&rsquo;midship-house with him, he suffers the same hardship as the men. He is
+very fair-skinned, and I noticed this afternoon, when he was pulling on a
+brace, that the sleeves of his oil-skins, assisted by the salt water, have
+chafed his wrists till they are raw and bleeding and breaking out in sea-boils.
+Mr. Mellaire tells me that in another week there will be a plague of these
+boils with all hands for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When do you think we&rsquo;ll be up with the Horn again?&rdquo; I
+innocently queried of Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned upon me in a rage, as if I had insulted him, and positively snarled
+in my face ere he swung away without the courtesy of an answer. It is evident
+that he takes the sea seriously. That is why, I fancy, he is so excellent a
+seaman.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days pass&mdash;if the interval of sombre gray that comes between the
+darknesses can be called day. For a week, now, we have not seen the sun. Our
+ship&rsquo;s position in this waste of storm and sea is conjectural. Once, by
+dead reckoning, we gained up with the Horn and a hundred miles south of it. And
+then came another sou&rsquo;west gale that tore our fore-topsail and brand new
+spencer out of the belt-ropes and swept us away to a conjectured longitude east
+of Staten Island.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, I know now this Great West Wind that blows forever around the world south
+of 55. And I know why the chart-makers have capitalized it, as, for instance,
+when I read &ldquo;The Great West Wind Drift.&rdquo; And I know why the
+<i>Sailing Directions</i> advise: &ldquo;<i>Whatever you do</i>, <i>make
+westing</i>! <i>make westing</i>!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the West Wind and the drift of the West Wind will not permit the
+<i>Elsinore</i> to make westing. Gale follows gale, always from the west, and
+we make easting. And it is bitter cold, and each gale snorts up with a prelude
+of driving snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the cabin the lamps burn all day long. No more does Mr. Pike run the
+phonograph, nor does Margaret ever touch the piano. She complains of being
+bruised and sore. I have a wrenched shoulder from being hurled against the
+wall. And both Wada and the steward are limping. Really, the only comfort I can
+find is in my bunk, so wedged with boxes and pillows that the wildest rolls
+cannot throw me out. There, save for my meals and for an occasional run on deck
+for exercise and fresh air, I lie and read eighteen and nineteen hours out of
+the twenty-four. But the unending physical strain is very wearisome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How it must be with the poor devils for&rsquo;ard is beyond conceiving. The
+forecastle has been washed out several times, and everything is soaking wet.
+Besides, they have grown weaker, and two watches are required to do what one
+ordinary watch could do. Thus, they must spend as many hours on the sea-swept
+deck and aloft on the freezing yards as I do in my warm, dry bunk. Wada tells
+me that they never undress, but turn into their wet bunks in their oil-skins
+and sea-boots and wet undergarments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To look at them crawling about on deck or in the rigging is enough. They are
+truly weak. They are gaunt-cheeked and haggard-gray of skin, with great dark
+circles under their eyes. The predicted plague of sea-boils and sea-cuts has
+come, and their hands and wrists and arms are frightfully afflicted. Now one,
+and now another, and sometimes several, either from being knocked down by seas
+or from general miserableness, take to the bunk for a day or so off. This means
+more work for the others, so that the men on their feet are not tolerant of the
+sick ones, and a man must be very sick to escape being dragged out to work by
+his mates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot but marvel at Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs. Old and fragile as they
+are, it seems impossible that they can endure what they do. For that matter, I
+cannot understand why they work at all. I cannot understand why any of them
+toil on and obey an order in this freezing hell of the Horn. Is it because of
+fear of death that they do not cease work and bring death to all of us? Or is
+it because they are slave-beasts, with a slave-psychology, so used all their
+lives to being driven by their masters that it is beyond their mental power to
+refuse to obey?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet most of them, in a week after we reach Seattle, will be on board other
+ships outward bound for the Horn. Margaret says the reason for this is that
+sailors forget. Mr. Pike agrees. He says give them a week in the south-east
+trades as we run up the Pacific and they will have forgotten that they have
+ever been around the Horn. I wonder. Can they be as stupid as this? Does pain
+leave no record with them? Do they fear only the immediate thing? Have they no
+horizons wider than a day? Then indeed do they belong where they are.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They <i>are</i> cowardly. This was shown conclusively this morning at two
+o&rsquo;clock. Never have I witnessed such panic fear, and it was fear of the
+immediate thing&mdash;fear, stupid and beast-like. It was Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s
+watch. As luck would have it, I was reading Boas&rsquo;s <i>Mind of Primitive
+Man</i> when I heard the rush of feet over my head. The <i>Elsinore</i> was
+hove to on the port tack at the time, under very short canvas. I was wondering
+what emergency had brought the watch upon the poop, when I heard another rush
+of feet that meant the second watch. I heard no pulling and hauling, and the
+thought of mutiny flashed across my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still nothing happened, and, growing curious, I got into my sea-boots,
+sheepskin coat, and oilskin, put on my sou&rsquo;wester and mittens, and went
+on deck. Mr. Pike had already dressed and was ahead of me. Captain West, who in
+this bad weather sleeps in the chart-room, stood in the lee doorway of the
+house, through which the lamplight streamed on the frightened faces of the men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those of the &rsquo;midship-house were not present, but every man Jack of the
+forecastle, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, as I afterwards
+learned, had joined in the flight aft. Andy Fay, who belonged in the watch
+below, had calmly remained in his bunk, while Mulligan Jacobs had taken
+advantage of the opportunity to sneak into the forecastle and fill his pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter, Mr. Pike?&rdquo; Captain West asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the mate could reply, Bert Rhine snickered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The devil&rsquo;s come aboard, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his snicker was palpably an assumption of unconcern he did not possess. The
+more I think over it the more I am surprised that such keen men as the
+gangsters should have been frightened by what had occurred. But frightened they
+were, the three of them, out of their bunks and out of the precious surcease of
+their brief watch below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So fear-struck was Larry that he chattered and grimaced like an ape, and
+shouldered and struggled to get away from the dark and into the safety of the
+shaft of light that shone out of the chart-house. Tony, the Greek, was just as
+bad, mumbling to himself and continually crossing himself. He was joined in
+this, as a sort of chorus, by the two Italians, Guido Bombini and Mike
+Cipriani. Arthur Deacon was almost in collapse, and he and Chantz, the Jew,
+shamelessly clung to each other for support. Bob, the fat and overgrown youth,
+was sobbing, while the other youth, Bony the Splinter, was shivering and
+chattering his teeth. Yes, and the two best sailors for&rsquo;ard, Tom Spink
+and the Maltese Cockney, stood in the background, their backs to the dark,
+their faces yearning toward the light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than all other contemptible things in this world there are two that I
+loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice in a man. The first
+turns me to ice. I cannot sympathize with hysteria. The second turns my
+stomach. Cowardice in a man is to me positively nauseous. And this fear-smitten
+mass of human animals on our reeling poop raised my gorge. Truly, had I been a
+god at that moment, I should have annihilated the whole mass of them. No; I
+should have been merciful to one. He was the Faun. His bright, pain-liquid, and
+flashing-eager eyes strained from face to face with desire to understand. He
+did not know what had occurred, and, being stone-deaf, had thought the rush aft
+a response to a call for all hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed Mr. Mellaire. He may be afraid of Mr. Pike, and he is a murderer; but
+at any rate he has no fear of the supernatural. With two men above him in
+authority, although it was his watch, there was no call for him to do anything.
+He swayed back and forth in balance to the violent motions of the
+<i>Elsinore</i> and looked on with eyes that were amused and cynical.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does the devil look like, my man?&rdquo; Captain West asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine grinned sheepishly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Answer the captain!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster&rsquo;s eyes for
+the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl. Then he replied to Captain West:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t wait to see, sir. But it&rsquo;s one whale of a
+devil.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s as big as a elephant, sir,&rdquo; volunteered Bill Quigley.
+&ldquo;I seen&rsquo;m face to face, sir. He almost got me when I run out of the
+fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;le.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Lord, sir!&rdquo; Larry moaned. &ldquo;The way he hit the house,
+sir. It was the call to Judgment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your theology is mixed, my man,&rdquo; Captain West smiled quietly,
+though I could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his
+wonderful Samurai eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to the mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pike, will you please go for&rsquo;ard and interview this devil?
+Fasten him up and tie him down and I&rsquo;ll take a look at him in the
+morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Mr. Pike; and Kipling&rsquo;s line came to me:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as I went for&rsquo;ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and Mr.
+Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge&mdash;not a sailor dared
+to accompany us&mdash;other lines of &ldquo;The Galley Slave&rdquo; drifted
+through my brain, such as:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in
+gold&mdash;<br />
+We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,<br />
+By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone by .
+. . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of the race,
+and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful henchman, the able
+sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and galled, the servant of the
+sweep-head that made mastery of the sea. I know him now. He can never again
+offend me. I forgive him everything&mdash;the whiskey raw on his breath the day
+I came aboard at Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his
+savagery to the men, his snarl and his sneer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On top the &rsquo;midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to
+recall. I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin about my neck,
+so that I was wet to the skin. We crossed the next span of bridge through
+driving spray, and were well upon the top of the for&rsquo;ard-house when
+something adrift on the deck hit the for&rsquo;ard wall a terrific smash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whatever it is, it&rsquo;s playing the devil,&rdquo; Mr. Pike yelled in
+my ear, as he endeavoured to locate the thing by the dry-battery light-stick
+which he carried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pencil of light travelled over dark water, white with foam, that churned
+upon the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There it goes!&rdquo; Mr. Pike cried, as the <i>Elsinore</i> dipped by
+the head and hurtled the water for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light went out as the three of us caught holds and crouched to a deluge of
+water from overside. As we emerged, from under the forecastle-head we heard a
+tremendous thumping and battering. Then, as the bow lifted, for an instant in
+the pencil of light that immediately lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object
+that bounded down the inclined deck where no water was. What became of it we
+could not see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire. Again, as the
+<i>Elsinore</i> dipped by the head and fetched a surge of sea-water from aft
+along the runway, I saw the dark object bound for&rsquo;ard directly at the
+mates. They sprang to safety from its charge, the light went out, while another
+icy sea broke aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time I could see nothing of the two men. Next, in the light flashed from
+the stick, I guessed that Mr. Pike was in pursuit of the thing. He evidently
+must have captured it at the rail against the starboard rigging and caught a
+turn around it with a loose end of rope. As the vessel rolled to windward some
+sort of a struggle seemed to be going on. The second mate sprang to the
+mate&rsquo;s assistance, and, together, with more loose ends, they seemed to
+subdue the thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I descended to see. By the light-stick we made it out to be a large,
+barnacle-crusted cask.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s been afloat for forty years,&rdquo; was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s
+judgment. &ldquo;Look at the size of the barnacles, and look at the
+whiskers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s full of something,&rdquo; said Mr. Mellaire. &ldquo;Hope
+it isn&rsquo;t water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for&rsquo;ard, between
+seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the shelter under the
+forecastle-head. As a result, even through my mittens, I was cut by the sharp
+edges of broken shell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s liquor of some sort,&rdquo; said the mate, &ldquo;but we
+won&rsquo;t risk broaching it till morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But where did it come from?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Over the side&rsquo;s the only place it could have come from.&rdquo; Mr.
+Pike played the light over it. &ldquo;Look at it! It&rsquo;s been afloat for
+years and years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The stuff ought to be well-seasoned,&rdquo; commented Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the
+forecastle and peered in. The men, in their headlong flight, had neglected to
+close the doors, and the place was afloat. In the flickering light from a small
+and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal picture. No self-respecting cave-man, I
+am sure, would have lived in such a hole.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house and rail,
+and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water rushed waist-deep.
+I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the room. From a top bunk, lying
+on his side, Andy Fay regarded me steadily with his bitter blue eyes. Seated on
+the rough table of heavy planks, his sea-booted feet swinging in the water,
+Mulligan Jacobs pulled at his pipe. When he observed me he pointed to pulpy
+book-pages that floated about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Me library&rsquo;s gone to hell,&rdquo; he mourned as he indicated the
+flotsam. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s me Byron. An&rsquo; there goes Zola an&rsquo;
+Browning with a piece of Shakespeare runnin&rsquo; neck an&rsquo; neck,
+an&rsquo; what&rsquo;s left of <i>Anti-Christ</i> makin&rsquo; a bad last.
+An&rsquo; there&rsquo;s Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl you can&rsquo;t
+tell &rsquo;em apart.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here the <i>Elsinore</i> lay down to starboard, and the water in the forecastle
+poured out against my legs and hips. My wet mittens slipped on the iron work,
+and I swept down the runway into the scuppers, where I was turned over and over
+by another flood that had just boarded from windward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal of salt
+water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and climbed to the top of
+the house. On my way aft along the bridge I encountered the crew coming
+for&rsquo;ard. Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were talking in the lee of the
+chart-house, and inside, as I passed below, Captain West was smoking a cigar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk with the
+<i>Mind of Primitive Man</i> before me, when the stampede over my head was
+repeated. I waited for the second rush. It came, and I proceeded to dress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men were more
+excited, more frightened. They were babbling and chattering all together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up!&rdquo; Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them. &ldquo;One
+at a time, and answer the captain&rsquo;s question.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t no barrel this time, sir,&rdquo; Tom Spink said.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s alive. An&rsquo; if it ain&rsquo;t the devil it&rsquo;s the
+ghost of a drownded man. I see &rsquo;m plain an&rsquo; clear. He&rsquo;s a
+man, or was a man once&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They was two of &rsquo;em, sir,&rdquo; Richard Giller, one of the
+&ldquo;bricklayers,&rdquo; broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir,&rdquo; Tom Spink went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; the other was Jespersen&mdash;I seen &rsquo;m,&rdquo; Giller
+added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They was three of &rsquo;em, sir,&rdquo; said Nosey Murphy.
+&ldquo;O&rsquo;Sullivan, sir, was the other one. They ain&rsquo;t devils, sir.
+They&rsquo;re drownded men. They come aboard right over the bows, an&rsquo;
+they moved slow like drownded men. Sorensen seen the first one first. He caught
+my arm an&rsquo; pointed, an&rsquo; then I seen &rsquo;m. He was on top the
+for&rsquo;ard-house. And Olansen seen &rsquo;m, an&rsquo; Deacon, sir,
+an&rsquo; Hackey. We all seen &rsquo;m, sir . . . an&rsquo; the second one;
+an&rsquo; when the rest run away I stayed long enough to see the third one.
+Mebbe there&rsquo;s more. I didn&rsquo;t wait to see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West stopped the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Pike,&rdquo; he said wearily, &ldquo;will you straighten this
+nonsense out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the men. &ldquo;Come
+on, all of you! There&rsquo;s three devils to tie down this time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the men shrank away from the order and from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For two cents . . . &rdquo; I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then
+choke off utterance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge. In the same order as on
+the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up the rear, we
+followed. It was a similar journey, save that we caught a ducking midway on the
+first span of bridge as well as a ducking on the &rsquo;midship-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We halted on top the for&rsquo;ard-house. In vain Mr. Pike flashed his
+light-stick. Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked dark water
+on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the crash and thunder of
+seas falling aboard. We advanced half-way across the last span of bridge to the
+fore-castle head, and were driven to pause and hang on at the foremast by a
+bursting sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick. I heard him exclaim
+something. Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed by Mr. Mellaire,
+while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and endured another ducking.
+Through the emergencies I could see the pencil of light, appearing and
+disappearing, darting here and there. Several minutes later the mates were back
+with me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Half our head-gear&rsquo;s carried away,&rdquo; Mr. Pike told me.
+&ldquo;We must have run into something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I felt a jar, right after you&rsquo; went below, sir, last time,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Mellaire. &ldquo;Only I thought it was a thump of sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So did I feel it,&rdquo; the mate agreed. &ldquo;I was just taking off
+my boots. I thought it was a sea. But where are the three devils?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Broaching the cask,&rdquo; the second mate suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went for&rsquo;ard,
+inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea. There lay the cask, securely
+lashed. The size of the barnacles on it was astonishing. They were as large as
+apples and inches deep. A down-fling of bow brought a foot of water about our
+boots; and as the bow lifted and the water drained away, it drew out from the
+shell-crusted cask streamers of seaweed a foot or so in length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the deck and
+rails between the forecastle-head and the for&rsquo;ard-house and found no
+devils. The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his light-stick cut
+like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky sea-lamp. And we saw
+the devils. Nosey Murphy had been right. There were three of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty, paint-scabbed
+iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with the filth of thirty
+men, despite the washing of the sea. In a top bunk, on his side, in sea-boots
+and oilskins, staring steadily with blue, bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table,
+pulling at a pipe, with hanging legs dragged this way and that by the churn of
+water, Mulligan Jacobs, solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody,
+who stand side by side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> down-flinging and up-lifting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But such men! I know my East Side and my East End, and I am accustomed to the
+faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was at fault. The
+Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had Scandinavia. They
+were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were they of the Brown, or Black,
+or Yellow. Their skin was white under a bronze of weather. Wet as was their
+hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair. Yet their eyes were
+dark&mdash;and yet not dark. They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor
+hazel. Nor were they black. They were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and
+dreamed like the eyes of great cats. They regarded us like walkers in a dream,
+these pale-haired storm-waifs with pale, topaz eyes. They did not bow, they did
+not smile, in no way did they recognize our presence save that they looked at
+us and dreamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Andy Fay greeted us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a hell of a night an&rsquo; not a wink of sleep with these
+goings-on,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now where did they blow in from a night like this?&rdquo; Mulligan
+Jacobs complained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got a tongue in your mouth,&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled.
+&ldquo;Why ain&rsquo;t you asked &rsquo;em?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As though you didn&rsquo;t know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you
+old stiff,&rdquo; Jacobs snarled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was no time for their private feud. Mr. Pike turned on the dreaming
+new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted phrases of a dozen
+languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon has had every opportunity to
+learn but is too stubborn-brained and wilful-mouthed to wrap his tongue about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The visitors made no reply. They did not even shake their heads. Their faces
+remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and pleasant, while in their
+eyes floated profounder dreams. Yet they were human. The blood of their
+injuries stained them and clotted on their clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dutchmen,&rdquo; snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other
+breeds, as he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike&rsquo;s ethnology is narrow. Outside his own race he is aware of only
+three races: niggers, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again our visitors proved themselves human. They understood the mate&rsquo;s
+invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed into three
+top-bunks and closed their eyes. I could swear the first of them was asleep in
+half a minute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll have to clean up for&rsquo;ard, or we&rsquo;ll be having the
+sticks about our ears,&rdquo; the mate said, already starting to depart.
+&ldquo;Get the men along, Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap36"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+And no westing! We have been swept back three degrees of easting since the
+night our visitors came on board. They are the great mystery, these three men
+of the sea. &ldquo;Horn Gypsies,&rdquo; Margaret calls them; and Mr. Pike dubs
+them &ldquo;Dutchmen.&rdquo; One thing is certain, they have a language of
+their own which they talk with one another. But of our hotch-potch of
+nationalities fore and aft there is no person who catches an inkling of their
+language or nationality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but this was
+indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter, who swears he is a
+Finn himself. Louis, the cook, avers that somewhere over the world, on some
+forgotten voyage, he has encountered men of their type; but he can neither
+remember the voyage nor their race. He and the rest of the Asiatics accept
+their presence as a matter of course; but the crew, with the exception of Andy
+Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very superstitious about the new-comers, and will
+have nothing to do with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No good will come of them, sir,&rdquo; Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us,
+shaking his head forebodingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret&rsquo;s mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy roll
+of the ship. We had paused from our promenade, which we now take each day,
+religiously, as a constitutional, between eleven and twelve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, what is the matter with them?&rdquo; she queried, nudging me
+privily in warning of what was coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because they ain&rsquo;t men, Miss, as we can rightly call men. They
+ain&rsquo;t regular men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board,&rdquo; she
+gurgled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s just it, Miss,&rdquo; Tom Spink exclaimed, brightening
+perceptibly at the hint of understanding. &ldquo;Where&rsquo;d they come from?
+They won&rsquo;t tell. Of course they won&rsquo;t tell. They ain&rsquo;t men.
+They&rsquo;re spirits&mdash;ghosts of sailors that drowned as long ago as when
+that cask went adrift from a sinkin&rsquo; ship, an&rsquo; that&rsquo;s years
+an&rsquo; years, Miss, as anybody can see, lookin&rsquo; at the size of the
+barnacles on it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think so?&rdquo; Margaret queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We all think so, Miss. We ain&rsquo;t spent our lives on the sea for
+nothin&rsquo;. There&rsquo;s no end of landsmen don&rsquo;t believe in the
+Flyin&rsquo; Dutchman. But what do they know? They&rsquo;re just landsmen,
+ain&rsquo;t they? They ain&rsquo;t never had their leg grabbed by a ghost, such
+as I had, on the <i>Kathleen</i>, thirty-five years ago, down in the hole
+&rsquo;tween the water-casks. An&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t that ghost rip the shoe
+right off of me? An&rsquo; didn&rsquo;t I fall through the hatch two days later
+an&rsquo; break my shoulder?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, Miss, I seen &rsquo;em makin&rsquo; signs to Mr. Pike that
+we&rsquo;d run into their ship hove to on the other tack. Don&rsquo;t you
+believe it. There wasn&rsquo;t no ship.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how do you explain the carrying away of our head-gear?&rdquo; I
+demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s lots of things can&rsquo;t be explained, sir,&rdquo; was
+Tom Spink&rsquo;s answer. &ldquo;Who can explain the way the Finns plays
+tom-fool tricks with the weather? Yet everybody knows it. Why are we
+havin&rsquo; a hard passage around the Horn, sir? I ask you that. Why,
+sir?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because of the carpenter, sir. We&rsquo;ve found out he&rsquo;s a Finn.
+Why did he keep it quiet all the way down from Baltimore?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why did he tell it?&rdquo; Margaret challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t tell it, Miss&mdash;leastways, not until after them
+three others boarded us. I got my suspicions he knows more about &rsquo;m than
+he&rsquo;s lettin&rsquo; on. An&rsquo; look at the weather an&rsquo; the delay
+we&rsquo;re gettin&rsquo;. An&rsquo; don&rsquo;t everybody know the Finns is
+regular warlocks an&rsquo; weather-breeders?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My ears pricked up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where did you get that word <i>warlock</i>?&rdquo; I questioned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Spink looked puzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wrong with it, sir?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing. It&rsquo;s all right. But where did you get it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never got it, sir. I always had it. That&rsquo;s what Finns
+is&mdash;warlocks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And these three new-comers&mdash;they aren&rsquo;t Finns?&rdquo; asked
+Margaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old Englishman shook his head solemnly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, Miss. They&rsquo;re drownded sailors a long time drownded. All you
+have to do is look at &rsquo;m. An&rsquo; the carpenter could tell us a few if
+he was minded.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, our mysterious visitors are a welcome addition to our weakened
+crew. I watch them at work. They are strong and willing. Mr. Pike says they are
+real sailormen, even if he doesn&rsquo;t understand their lingo. His theory is
+that they are from some small old-country or outlander ship, which, hove to on
+the opposite tack to the <i>Elsinore</i>, was run down and sunk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have forgotten to say that we found the barnacled cask nearly filled with a
+most delicious wine which none of us can name. As soon as the gale moderated
+Mr. Pike had the cask brought aft and broached, and now the steward and Wada
+have it all in bottles and spare demijohns. It is beautifully aged, and Mr.
+Pike is certain that it is some sort of a mild and unheard-of brandy. Mr.
+Mellaire merely smacks his lips over it, while Captain West, Margaret, and I
+steadfastly maintain that it is wine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The condition of the men grows deplorable. They were always poor at pulling on
+ropes, but now it takes two or three to pull as much as one used to pull. One
+thing in their favour is that they are well, though grossly, fed. They have all
+they want to eat, such as it is, but it is the cold and wet, the terrible
+condition of the forecastle, the lack of sleep, and the almost continuous toil
+of both watches on deck. Either watch is so weak and worthless that any severe
+task requires the assistance of the other watch. As an instance, we finally
+managed a reef in the foresail in the thick of a gale. It took both watches two
+hours, yet Mr. Pike tells me that under similar circumstances, with an average
+crew of the old days, he has seen a single watch reef the foresail in twenty
+minutes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have learned one of the prime virtues of a steel sailing-ship. Such a craft,
+heavily laden, does not strain her seams open in bad weather and big seas.
+Except for a tiny leak down in the fore-peak, with which we sailed from
+Baltimore and which is bailed out with a pail once in several weeks, the
+<i>Elsinore</i> is bone-dry. Mr. Pike tells me that had a wooden ship of her
+size and cargo gone through the buffeting we have endured, she would be leaking
+like a sieve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Mr. Mellaire, out of his own experience, has added to my respect for the
+Horn. When he was a young man he was once eight weeks in making around from 50
+in the Atlantic to 50 in the Pacific. Another time his vessel was compelled to
+put back twice to the Falklands for repairs. And still another time, in a
+wooden ship running back in distress to the Falklands, his vessel was lost in a
+shift of gale in the very entrance to Port Stanley. As he told me:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And after we&rsquo;d been there a month, sir, who should come in but the
+old <i>Lucy Powers</i>. She was a sight!&mdash;her foremast clean gone out of
+her and half her spars, the old man killed from one of the spars falling on
+him, the mate with two broken arms, the second mate sick, and what was left of
+the crew at the pumps. We&rsquo;d lost our ship, so my skipper took charge,
+refitted her, doubled up both crews, and we headed the other way around,
+pumping two hours in every watch clear to Honolulu.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The poor wretched chickens! Because of their ill-judged moulting they are quite
+featherless. It is a marvel that one of them survives, yet so far we have lost
+only six. Margaret keeps the kerosene stove going, and, though they have ceased
+laying, she confidently asserts that they are all layers and that we shall have
+plenty of eggs once we get fine weather in the Pacific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is little use to describe these monotonous and perpetual westerly gales.
+One is very like another, and they follow so fast on one another&rsquo;s heels
+that the sea never has a chance to grow calm. So long have we rolled and tossed
+about that the thought, say, of a solid, unmoving billiard-table is
+inconceivable. In previous incarnations I have encountered things that did not
+move, but . . . they were in previous incarnations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have been up to the Diego Ramirez Rocks twice in the past ten days. At the
+present moment, by vague dead reckoning, we are two hundred miles east of them.
+We have been hove down to our hatches three times in the last week. We have had
+six stout sails, of the heaviest canvas, furled and double-gasketed, torn loose
+and stripped from the yards. Sometimes, so weak are our men, not more than half
+of them can respond to the call for all hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lars Jacobson, who had his leg broken early in the voyage, was knocked down by
+a sea several days back and had the leg rebroken. Ditman Olansen, the
+crank-eyed Norwegian, went Berserker last night in the second dog-watch and
+pretty well cleaned out his half of the forecastle. Wada reports that it
+required the bricklayers, Fitzgibbon and Gilder, the Maltese Cockney, and Steve
+Roberts, the cowboy, finally to subdue the madman. These are all men of Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s watch. In Mr. Pike&rsquo;s watch John Hackey, the San
+Francisco hoodlum, who has stood out against the gangsters, has at last
+succumbed and joined them. And only this morning Mr. Pike dragged Charles Davis
+by the scruff of the neck out of the forecastle, where he had caught him
+expounding sea-law to the miserable creatures. Mr. Mellaire, I notice on
+occasion, remains unduly intimate with the gangster clique. And yet nothing
+serious happens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Charles Davis does not die. He seems actually to be gaining in weight. He
+never misses a meal. From the break of the poop, in the shelter of the weather
+cloth, our decks a thunder and rush of freezing water, I often watch him slip
+out of his room between seas, mug and plate in hand, and hobble for&rsquo;ard
+to the galley for his food. He is a keen judge of the ship&rsquo;s motions, for
+never yet have I seen him get a serious ducking. Sometimes, of course, he may
+get splattered with spray or wet to the knees, but he manages to be out of the
+way whenever a big graybeard falls on board.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap37"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+A wonderful event to-day! For five minutes, at noon, the sun was actually
+visible. But such a sun!&mdash;a pale and cold and sickly orb that at meridian
+was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon. And within the hour we were
+taking in sail and lying down to the snow-gusts of a fresh south-west gale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Whatever you do</i>, <i>make westing</i>! <i>make westing</i>!&mdash;this
+sailing rule of the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron. I can
+understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left sailors,
+fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a boat. Cape Horn is
+iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around from east to west.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And we make easting! This west wind is eternal. I listen incredulously when Mr.
+Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when easterly winds have blown in these
+latitudes. It is impossible. Always does the west wind blow, gale upon gale and
+gales everlasting, else why the &ldquo;Great West Wind Drift&rdquo; printed on
+the charts! We of the afterguard are weary of this eternal buffeting. Our men
+have become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded shadows of men. I should not be
+surprised, in the end, to see Captain West turn tail and run eastward around
+the world to Seattle. But Margaret smiles with surety, and nods her head, and
+affirms that her father will win around to 50 in the Pacific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room of iron in
+the &rsquo;midship-house is beyond me&mdash;just as it is beyond me that the
+wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down in their bunks and
+die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of the watches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty miles due
+south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a driving gale, on the
+port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even Mr. Pike acknowledges that it
+is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters he has ever experienced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64 degrees or 65
+degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a favouring spell, to make
+westing at a prodigious rate across the extreme-narrowing wedges of longitude.
+But of late years all shipmasters have accepted the hugging of the land all the
+way around. Out of ten times ten thousand passages of Cape Stiff from east to
+west, this, they have concluded, is the best strategy. So Captain West hugs the
+land. He heaves-to on the port tack until the leeward drift brings the land
+into perilous proximity, then wears ship and heaves-to on the port tack and
+makes leeway off shore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a frigid sea,
+but at the same time I do not mind it. In my brain burns the flame of a great
+discovery and a great achievement. I have found what makes all the books go
+glimmering; I have achieved what my very philosophy tells me is the greatest
+achievement a man can make. I have found the love of woman. I do not know
+whether she cares for me. Nor is that the point. The point is that in myself I
+have risen to the greatest height to which the human male animal can rise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I know a woman and her name is Margaret. She is Margaret, a woman and
+desirable. My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so proudly deemed
+myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the books. As for De
+Casseres&mdash;if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I shall
+confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the schools. Love is
+the final word. To the rational man it alone gives the super-rational sanction
+for living. Like Bergson in his overhanging heaven of intuition, or like one
+who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod
+the materialistic dictums of science underfoot, scaled the last peak of
+philosophy, and leaped into my heaven, which, after all, is within myself. The
+stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme
+realization in the love of woman. It is the vindication of being. Yes, and it
+is the wages of being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty
+of flesh and breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know what women
+are. And I know Margaret for what she is&mdash;mere woman; and yet I know, in
+the lover&rsquo;s soul of me, that she is somehow different. Her ways are not
+as the ways of other women, and all her ways are delightful to me. In the end,
+I suppose, I shall become a nest-builder, for of a surety nest-building is one
+of her pretty ways. And who shall say which is the worthier&mdash;the writing
+of a whole library or the building of a nest?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by. It is now a month
+since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are, not so well forward as
+a month ago, because we are something like a hundred miles south of the Straits
+of Le Maire. Even this position is conjectural, being arrived at by dead
+reckoning, based on the leeway of a ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on
+the other, with always the Great West Wind Drift making against us. It is four
+days since our last instrument-sight of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This storm-vexed ocean has become populous. No ships are getting round, and
+each day adds to our number. Never a brief day passes without our sighting from
+two or three to a dozen hove-to on port tack or starboard tack. Captain West
+estimates there must be at least two hundred sail of us. A ship hove-to with
+preventer tackles on the rudder-head is unmanageable. Each night we take our
+chance of unavoidable and disastrous collision. And at times, glimpsed through
+the snow-squalls, we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive past us
+with the West Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs. And so wild is the
+mind of man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still aver that on occasion they
+have known gales to blow ships from east to west around the Horn. It surely has
+been a year since we of the <i>Elsinore</i> emerged from under the lee of
+Tierra Del Fuego into the snorting south-west gales. A century, at least, has
+elapsed since we sailed from Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I don&rsquo;t give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of this
+dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth. I have told Margaret that I love her. The
+tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth, where we clung together in
+the second dog-watch last evening. And it was told again, and by both of us, in
+the bright-lighted chart-room after the watches had been changed at eight
+bells. Yes, and her face was storm-bright, and all of her was very proud, save
+that her eyes were warm and soft and fluttered with lids that just would
+flutter maidenly and womanly. It was a great hour&mdash;our great hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved. Grievous indeed
+must be the fate of the lover who is unloved. And I, for one, and for still
+other reasons, congratulate myself upon the vastitude of my good fortune. For
+see, were Margaret any other sort of a woman, were she . . . well, just the
+lovely and lovable and adorably snuggly sort who seem made just precisely for
+love and loving and nestling into the strong arms of a man&mdash;why, there
+wouldn&rsquo;t be anything remarkable or wonderful about her loving me. But
+Margaret is Margaret, strong, self-possessed, serene, controlled, a very
+mistress of herself. And there&rsquo;s the miracle&mdash;that such a woman
+should have been awakened to love by me. It is almost unbelievable. I go out of
+my way to get another peep into those long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see
+them grow melting soft as she looks at me. She is no Juliet, thank the Lord;
+and thank the Lord I am no Romeo. And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop,
+and under my breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards
+thundering down on us, that I am a lover. And I send messages to the lonely
+albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover. And I look at the
+wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge and know that never in
+ten thousand wretched lives could they experience the love I experience, and I
+wonder why God ever made them.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start,&rdquo; Margaret
+confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from my arms,
+&ldquo;was that I would not permit you to make love to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True daughter of Herodias,&rdquo; I gaily gibed, &ldquo;so such was the
+drift of your thoughts even as early as the very start. Already you were
+looking upon me with a considerative female eye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed proudly, and did not reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
+you?&rdquo; I insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages,&rdquo;
+she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then others have . . . ?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They always do,&rdquo; she assured me gravely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but I laughed
+it away and retorted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as having
+said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered, namely, that a woman
+pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wretch!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I never fluttered. When did I ever
+flutter!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a delicate subject . . . &rdquo; I began with assumed hesitancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did I ever flutter?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer&rsquo;s ruses by making a shift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to miss
+observing,&rdquo; I charged. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wager you knew as quickly as I
+the very instant when I first loved you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I knew the first time you hated me,&rdquo; she evaded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were coming
+on the voyage,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But now I repeat my challenge. You knew as
+quickly as I the first instant I loved you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
+tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a low, quiet
+voice said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I . . . I think I know. It was the morning of that pampero off the
+Plate, when you were thrown through the door into my father&rsquo;s stateroom.
+I saw it in your eyes. I knew it. I think it was the first time, the very
+instant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could only nod my head and draw her close to me. And she looked up at me and
+added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were very ridiculous. There you sat, on the bed, holding on with one
+hand and nursing the other hand under your arm, staring at me, irritated,
+startled, utterly foolish, and then . . . how, I don&rsquo;t know . . . I knew
+that you had just come to know . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the very next instant you froze up,&rdquo; I charged ungallantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And that was why,&rdquo; she admitted shamelessly, then leaned away from
+me, her hands resting on my shoulders, while she gurgled and her lips parted
+from over her beautiful white teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing I, John Pathurst, know: that gurgling laughter of hers is the most
+adorable laughter that was ever heard.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap38"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I wonder. I wonder. Did the Samurai make a mistake? Or was it the darkness of
+oncoming death that chilled and clouded that star-cool brain of his, and made a
+mock of all his wisdom? Or was it the blunder that brought death upon him
+beforehand? I do not know, I shall never know; for it is a matter no one of us
+dreams of hinting at, much less discussing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall begin at the beginning&mdash;yesterday afternoon. For it was yesterday
+afternoon, five weeks to a day since we emerged from the Straits of Le Maire
+into this gray storm-ocean, that once again we found ourselves hove to directly
+off the Horn. At the changing of the watches at four o&rsquo;clock, Captain
+West gave the command to Mr. Pike to wear ship. We were on the starboard tack
+at the time, making leeway off shore. This manoeuvre placed us on the port
+tack, and the consequent leeway, to me, seemed on shore, though at an acute
+angle, to be sure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the chart-room, glancing curiously at the chart, I measured the distance
+with my eye and decided that we were in the neighbourhood of fifteen miles off
+Cape Horn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With our drift we&rsquo;ll be close up under the land by morning,
+won&rsquo;t we?&rdquo; I ventured tentatively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Captain West nodded; &ldquo;and if it weren&rsquo;t for the
+West Wind Drift, and if the land did not trend to the north-east, we&rsquo;d be
+ashore by morning. As it is, we&rsquo;ll be well under it at daylight, ready to
+steal around if there is a change, ready to wear ship if there is no
+change.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It did not enter my head to question his judgment. What he said had to be. Was
+he not the Samurai?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr. Pike enter
+the chart-house. After several paces up and down, and a brief pause to watch
+Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth from lee to weather, I strolled
+aft to the chart-house. Prompted by I know not what, I peeped through one of
+the glass ports.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There stood Mr. Pike, his sou&rsquo;wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
+rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in hand, bent
+over the chart. It was the expression of his face that startled me. The
+habitual sourness had vanished. All that I could see was anxiety and
+apprehension . . . yes, and age. I had never seen him look so old; for there,
+at that moment, I beheld the wastage and weariness of all his sixty-nine years
+of sea-battling and sea-staring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of the poop,
+where I held on and stood staring through the gray and spray in the conjectural
+direction of our drift. Somewhere, there, in the north-east and north, I knew
+was a broken, iron coast of rocks upon which the graybeards thundered. And
+there, in the chart-room, a redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart
+as he measured and calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position
+and our drift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I knew it could not be. It was not the Samurai but the henchman who was
+weak and wrong. Age was beginning to tell upon him at last, which could not be
+otherwise than expected when one considered that no man in ten thousand had
+weathered age so successfully as he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I laughed at my moment&rsquo;s qualm of foolishness and went below, well
+content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father&rsquo;s wisdom.
+Of course he was right. He had proved himself right too often already on the
+long voyage from Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait. He took no part whatever in the
+conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
+without&mdash;to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
+jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the smash and
+crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron walls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too discreet to
+question him then, or afterwards alone, about his trouble. At eight he went on
+deck again to take the watch till midnight, and as I went to bed I dismissed
+all forebodings and speculated as to how many more voyages he could last after
+this sudden onslaught of old age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I fell asleep quickly, and awoke at midnight, my lamp still burning,
+Conrad&rsquo;s <i>Mirror of the Sea</i> on my breast where it had dropped from
+my hands. I heard the watches change, and was wide awake and reading when Mr.
+Pike came below by the booby-hatch and passed down my hall by my open door, on
+his way to his room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a
+cigarette. Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the cigarette was
+lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his lungs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad&rsquo;s delightful chapter,
+&ldquo;The Weight of the Burden,&rdquo; I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-booted,
+oilskinned, sou&rsquo;westered. It was his watch below, and his sleep was
+meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that somewhere
+up above he was staring into the driving dark. I dressed fully, in all my heavy
+storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou&rsquo;-wester to sheepskin under my oilskin
+coat. At the foot of the stairs I noted along the hall that Margaret&rsquo;s
+light was burning. I peeped in&mdash;she keeps her door open for
+ventilation&mdash;and found her reading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Merely not sleepy,&rdquo; she assured me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension. She does not know
+even now, I am confident, the Samurai&rsquo;s blunder&mdash;if blunder it was.
+As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although there is no telling in what
+occult ways she may have received though not recognized Mr. Pike&rsquo;s
+anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the lee door
+of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room. On the couch, lying on his
+back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought, slept Captain West. The room was
+warm from the ascending heat of the cabin, so that he lay unblanketed, fully
+dressed save for oilskins and boots. He breathed easily and steadily, and the
+lean, ascetic lines of his face seemed softened by the light of the low-turned
+lamp. And that one glance restored to me all my surety and faith in his wisdom,
+so that I laughed at myself for having left my warm bed for a freezing trip on
+deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr. Mellaire. He was
+wide awake, but under no strain. Evidently it had not entered his mind to
+consider, much less question, the manoeuvre of wearing ship the previous
+afternoon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The gale is breaking,&rdquo; he told me, waving his mittened hand at a
+starry segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But where was Mr. Pike? Did the second mate know he was on deck? I proceeded to
+feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along the mad poop toward the
+wheel. I talked about the difficulty of sleeping in stormy weather, stated the
+restlessness and semi-insomnia that the violent motion of the ship caused in
+me, and raised the query of how bad weather affected the officers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping like a
+baby,&rdquo; I concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trust us to sleep just the same way, Mr. Pathurst,&rdquo; the second
+mate laughed. &ldquo;The harder the weather the harder the demand on us, and
+the harder we sleep. I&rsquo;m dead the moment my head touches the pillow. It
+takes Mr. Pike longer, because he always finishes his cigarette after he turns
+in. But he smokes while he&rsquo;s undressing, so that he doesn&rsquo;t require
+more than a minute to go deado. I&rsquo;ll wager he hasn&rsquo;t moved, right
+now, since ten minutes after twelve.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the second mate did not dream the first was even on deck. I went below to
+make sure. A small sea-lamp was burning in Mr. Pike&rsquo;s room, and I saw his
+bunk unoccupied. I went in by the big stove in the dining-room and warmed up,
+then again came on deck. I did not go near the weather cloth, where I was
+certain Mr. Mellaire was; but, keeping along the lee of the poop, I gained the
+bridge and started for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was in no hurry, so I paused often in that cold, wet journey. The gale was
+breaking, for again and again the stars glimmered through the thinning
+storm-clouds. On the &rsquo;midship-house was no Mr. Pike. I crossed it, stung
+by the freezing, flying spray, and carefully reconnoitred the top of the
+for&rsquo;ard-house, where, in such bad weather, I knew the lookout was
+stationed. I was within twenty feet of them, when a wider clearance of starry
+sky showed me the figures of the lookout, whoever he was, and of Mr. Pike, side
+by side. Long I watched them, not making my presence known, and I knew that the
+old mate&rsquo;s eyes were boring like gimlets into the windy darkness that
+separated the <i>Elsinore</i> from the thunder-surfed iron coast he sought to
+find.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coming back to the poop I was caught by the surprised Mr. Mellaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thought you were asleep, sir,&rdquo; he chided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m too restless,&rdquo; I explained. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve read until
+my eyes are tired, and now I&rsquo;m trying to get chilled so that I can fall
+asleep while warming up in my blankets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I envy you, sir,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Think of it! So much of all
+night in that you cannot sleep. Some day, if ever I make a lucky strike, I
+shall make a voyage like this as a passenger, and have all watches below. Think
+of it! All blessed watches below! And I shall, like you, sir, bring a Jap
+servant along, and I&rsquo;ll make him call me at every changing of the
+watches, so that, wide awake, I can appreciate my good fortune in the several
+minutes before I roll over and go to sleep again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We laughed good night to each other. Another peep into the chart-room showed me
+Captain West sleeping as before. He had not moved in general, though all his
+body moved with every roll and fling of the ship. Below, Margaret&rsquo;s light
+still burned, but a peep showed her asleep, her book fallen from her hands just
+as was the so frequent case with my books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I wondered. Half the souls of us on the <i>Elsinore</i> slept. The Samurai
+slept. Yet the old first mate, who should have slept, kept a bitter watch on
+the for&rsquo;ard-house. Was his anxiety right? Could it be right? Or was it
+the crankiness of ultimate age? Were we drifting and leewaying to destruction?
+Or was it merely an old man being struck down by senility in the midst of his
+life-task?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Too wide awake to think of sleeping, I ensconced myself with <i>The Mirror of
+the Sea</i> at the dining-table. Nor did I remove aught of my storm-gear save
+the soggy mittens, which I wrung out and hung to dry by the stove. Four bells
+struck, and six bells, and Mr. Pike had not returned below. At eight bells,
+with the changing of the watches, it came upon me what a night of hardship the
+old mate was enduring. Eight to twelve had been his own watch on deck. He had
+now completed the four hours of the second mate&rsquo;s watch and was beginning
+his own watch, which would last till eight in the morning&mdash;twelve
+consecutive hours in a Cape Horn gale with the mercury at freezing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next&mdash;for I had dozed&mdash;I heard loud cries above my head that were
+repeated along the poop. I did not know till afterwards that it was Mr.
+Pike&rsquo;s command to hard-up the helm, passed along from for&rsquo;ard by
+the men he had stationed at intervals on the bridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All that I knew at this shock of waking was that something was happening above.
+As I pulled on my steaming mittens and hurried my best up the reeling stairs, I
+could hear the stamp of men&rsquo;s feet that for once were not lagging. In the
+chart-house hall I heard Mr. Pike, who had already covered the length of the
+bridge from the for&rsquo;ard-house, shouting:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mizzen-braces! Slack, damn you! Slack on the run! But hold a turn! Aft,
+here, all of you! Jump! Lively, if you don&rsquo;t want to swim! Come in,
+port-braces! Don&rsquo;t let &rsquo;m get away! Lee-braces!&mdash;if you lose
+that turn I&rsquo;ll split your skull! Lively! Lively!&mdash;Is that helm hard
+over! Why in hell don&rsquo;t you answer?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this I heard as I dashed for the lee door and as I wondered why I did not
+hear the Samurai&rsquo;s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, as I passed the chart-room door, I saw him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was sitting on the couch, white-faced, one sea-boot in his hands, and I
+could have sworn his hands were shaking. That much I saw, and the next moment
+was out on deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first, just emerged from the light, I could see nothing, although I could
+hear men at the pin-rails and the mate snarling and shouting commands. But I
+knew the manoeuvre. With a weak crew, in the big, tail-end sea of a broken
+gale, breakers and destruction under her lee, the <i>Elsinore</i> was being
+worn around. We had been under lower-topsails and a reefed foresail all night.
+Mr. Pike&rsquo;s first action, after putting the wheel up, had been to square
+the mizzen-yards. With the wind-pressure thus eased aft, the stern could more
+easily swing against the wind while the wind-pressure on the
+for&rsquo;ard-sails paid the bow off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it takes time to wear a ship, under short canvas, in a big sea. Slowly,
+very slowly, I could feel the direction of the wind altering against my cheek.
+The moon, dim at first, showed brighter and brighter as the last shreds of a
+flying cloud drove away from before it. In vain I looked for any land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Main-braces!&mdash;all of you!&mdash;jump!&rdquo; Mr. Pike shouted,
+himself leading the rush along the poop. And the men really rushed. Not in all
+the months I had observed them had I seen such swiftness of energy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I made my way to the wheel, where Tom Spink stood. He did not notice me. With
+one hand holding the idle wheel, he was leaning out to one side, his eyes fixed
+in a fascinated stare. I followed its direction, on between the chart-house and
+the port-jigger shrouds, and on across a mountain sea that was very vague in
+the moonlight. And then I saw it! The <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> stern was flung
+skyward, and across that cold ocean I saw land&mdash;black rocks and
+snow-covered slopes and crags. And toward this land the <i>Elsinore</i>, now
+almost before the wind, was driving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the &rsquo;midship-house came the snarls of the mate and the cries of the
+sailors. They were pulling and hauling for very life. Then came Mr. Pike,
+across the poop, leaping with incredible swiftness, sending his snarl before
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ease that wheel there! What the hell you gawkin&rsquo; at? Steady her as
+I tell you. That&rsquo;s all you got to do!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From for&rsquo;ard came a cry, and I knew Mr. Mellaire was on top of the
+for&rsquo;ard-house and managing the fore-yards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now!&rdquo;&mdash;from Mr. Pike. &ldquo;More spokes! Steady! Steady! And
+be ready to check her!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bounded away along the poop again, shouting for men for the mizzen-braces.
+And the men appeared, some of his watch, others of the second mate&rsquo;s
+watch, routed from sleep&mdash;men coatless, and hatless, and bootless; men
+ghastly-faced with fear but eager for once to spring to the orders of the man
+who knew and could save their miserable lives from miserable death.
+Yes&mdash;and I noted the delicate-handed cook, and Yatsuda, the sail-maker,
+pulling with his one unparalysed hand. It was all hands to save ship, and all
+hands knew it. Even Sundry Buyers, who had drifted aft in his stupidity instead
+of being for&rsquo;ard with his own officer, forebore to stare about and to
+press his abdomen. For the nonce he pulled like a youngling of twenty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon covered again, and it was in darkness that the <i>Elsinore</i> rounded
+up on the wind on the starboard tack. This, in her case, under lower-topsails
+only, meant that she lay eight points from the wind, or, in land terms, at
+right angles to the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was splendid, marvellous. Even as the <i>Elsinore</i> was rounding to
+on the wind, while the head-yards were still being braced, and even as he was
+watching the ship&rsquo;s behaviour and the wheel, in between his commands to
+Tom Spink of &ldquo;A spoke! A spoke or two! Another! Steady! Hold her! Ease
+her!&rdquo; he was ordering the men aloft to loose sail. I had thought, the
+manoeuvre of wearing achieved, that we were saved, but this setting of all
+three upper-topsails unconvinced me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon remained hidden, and to leeward nothing could be seen. As each sail
+was set, the <i>Elsinore</i> was pressed farther and farther over, and I
+realized that there was plenty of wind left, despite the fact that the gale had
+broken or was breaking. Also, under this additional canvas, I could feel the
+<i>Elsinore</i> moving through the water. Pike now sent the Maltese Cockney to
+help Tom Spink at the wheel. As for himself, he took his stand beside the
+booby-hatch, where he could gauge the <i>Elsinore</i>, gaze to leeward, and
+keep his eye on the helmsmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Full and by,&rdquo; was his reiterated command. &ldquo;Keep her a good
+full&mdash;a rap-full; but don&rsquo;t let her fall away. Hold her to it, and
+drive her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took no notice whatever of me, although I, on my way to the lee of the
+chart-house, stood at his shoulder a full minute, offering him a chance to
+speak. He knew I was there, for his big shoulder brushed my arm as he swayed
+and turned to warn the helmsmen in the one breath to hold her up to it but to
+keep her full. He had neither time nor courtesy for a passenger in such a
+moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sheltering by the chart-house, I saw the moon appear. It grew brighter and
+brighter, and I saw the land, dead to leeward of us, not three hundred yards
+away. It was a cruel sight&mdash;black rock and bitter snow, with cliffs so
+perpendicular that the <i>Elsinore</i> could have laid alongside of them in
+deep water, with great gashes and fissures, and with great surges thundering
+and spouting along all the length of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our predicament was now clear to me. We had to weather the bight of land and
+islands into which we had drifted, and sea and wind worked directly on shore.
+The only way out was to drive through the water, to drive fast and hard, and
+this was borne in upon me by Mr. Pike bounding past to the break of the poop,
+where I heard him shout to Mr. Mellaire to set the mainsail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Evidently the second mate was dubious, for the next cry of Mr. Pike&rsquo;s
+was:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Damn the reef! You&rsquo;d be in hell first! Full mainsail! All hands to
+it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The difference was appreciable at once when that huge spread of canvas opposed
+the wind. The <i>Elsinore</i> fairly leaped and quivered as she sprang to it,
+and I could feel her eat to windward as she at the same time drove faster
+ahead. Also, in the rolls and gusts, she was forced down till her lee-rail
+buried and the sea foamed level across to her hatches. Mr. Pike watched her
+like a hawk, and like certain death he watched the Maltese Cockney and Tom
+Spink at the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Land on the lee bow!&rdquo; came a cry from for&rsquo;ard, that was
+carried on from mouth to mouth along the bridge to the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw Mr. Pike nod his head grimly and sarcastically. He had already seen it
+from the lee-poop, and what he had not seen he had guessed. A score of times I
+saw him test the weight of the gusts on his cheek and with all the brain of him
+study the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> behaviour. And I knew what was in his mind.
+Could she carry what she had? Could she carry more?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Small wonder, in this tense passage of time, that I had forgotten the Samurai.
+Nor did I remember him until the chart-house door swung open and I caught him
+by the arm. He steadied and swayed beside me, while he watched that cruel
+picture of rock and snow and spouting surf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A good full!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled. &ldquo;Or I&rsquo;ll eat your
+heart out. God damn you for the farmer&rsquo;s hound you are, Tom Spink! Ease
+her! Ease her! Ease her into the big ones, damn you! Don&rsquo;t let her head
+fall off! Steady! Where in hell did you learn to steer? What cow-farm was you
+raised on?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here he bounded for&rsquo;ard past us with those incredible leaps of his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be good to set the mizzen-topgallant,&rdquo; I heard Captain
+West mutter in a weak, quavery voice. &ldquo;Mr. Pathurst, will you please tell
+Mr. Pike to set the mizzen-topgallant?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at that very instant Mr. Pike&rsquo;s voice rang out from the break of the
+poop:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Mellaire!&mdash;the mizzen-topgallant!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Captain West&rsquo;s head drooped until his chin rested on his breast, and so
+low did he mutter that I leaned to hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very good officer,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;An excellent officer. Mr.
+Pathurst, if you will kindly favour me, I should like to go in. I . . . I
+haven&rsquo;t got on my boots.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The muscular feat was to open the heavy iron door and hold it open in the rolls
+and plunges. This I accomplished; but when I had helped Captain West across the
+high threshold he thanked me and waived further services. And I did not know
+even then he was dying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never was a Blackwood ship driven as was the <i>Elsinore</i> during the next
+half-hour. The full-jib was also set, and, as it departed in shreds, the
+fore-topmast staysail was being hoisted. For&rsquo;ard of the
+&rsquo;midship-house it was made unlivable by the bursting seas. Mr. Mellaire,
+with half the crew, clung on somehow on top the &rsquo;midship-house, while the
+rest of the crew was with us in the comparative safety of the poop. Even
+Charles Davis, drenched and shivering, hung on beside me to the brass
+ring-handle of the chart-house door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such sailing! It was a madness of speed and motion, for the <i>Elsinore</i>
+drove over and through and under those huge graybeards that thundered
+shore-ward. There were times, when rolls and gusts worked against her at the
+same moment, when I could have sworn the ends of her lower-yardarms swept the
+sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was one chance in ten that we could claw off. All knew it, and all knew
+there was nothing more to do but await the issue. And we waited in silence. The
+only voice was that of the mate, intermittently cursing, threatening, and
+ordering Tom Spink and the Maltese Cockney at the wheel. Between whiles, and
+all the while, he gauged the gusts, and ever his eyes lifted to the
+main-topgallant-yard. He wanted to set that one more sail. A dozen times I saw
+him half-open his mouth to give the order he dared not give. And as I watched
+him, so all watched him. Hard-bitten, bitter-natured, sour-featured and
+snarling-mouthed, he was the one man, the henchman of the race, the master of
+the moment. &ldquo;And where,&rdquo; was my thought, &ldquo;O where was the
+Samurai?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One chance in ten? It was one in a hundred as we fought to weather the last
+bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and open ocean.
+So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling skysail-yards strike the
+face of the rock. So close were we, no more than a biscuit toss from its iron
+buttress, that as we sank down into the last great trough between two seas I
+can swear every one of us held breath and waited for the <i>Elsinore</i> to
+strike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead we drove free. And as if in very rage at our escape, the storm took
+that moment to deal us the mightiest buffet of all. The mate felt that monster
+sea coming, for he sprang to the wheel ere the blow fell. I looked
+for&rsquo;ard, and I saw all for&rsquo;ard blotted out by the mountain of water
+that fell aboard. The <i>Elsinore</i> righted from the shock and reappeared to
+the eye, full of water from rail to rail. Then a gust caught her sails and
+heeled her over, spilling half the enormous burden outboard again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Along the bridge came the relayed cry of &ldquo;Man overboard!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced at the mate, who had just released the wheel to the helmsmen. He
+shook his head, as if irritated by so trivial a happening, walked to the corner
+of the half-wheelhouse, and stared at the coast he had escaped, white and black
+and cold in the moonlight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire came aft, and they met beside me in the lee of the chart-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All hands, Mr. Mellaire,&rdquo; the mate said, &ldquo;and get the
+mainsail off of her. After that, the mizzen-topgallant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said the second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who was it?&rdquo; the mate asked, as Mr. Mellaire was turning away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Boney&mdash;he was no good, anyway,&rdquo; came the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. Boney the Splinter was gone, and all hands were answering the
+command of Mr. Mellaire to take in the mainsail. But they never took it in; for
+at that moment it started to blow away out of the bolt-ropes, and in but few
+moments all that was left of it was a few short, slatting ribbons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mizzen-topgallant-sail!&rdquo; Mr. Pike ordered. Then, and for the first
+time, he recognized my existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well rid of it,&rdquo; he growled. &ldquo;It never did set properly. I
+was always aching to get my hands on the sail-maker that made it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On my way below a glance into the chart-room gave me the cue to the
+Samurai&rsquo;s blunder&mdash;if blunder it can be called, for no one will ever
+know. He lay on the floor in a loose heap, rolling willy-nilly with every roll
+of the <i>Elsinore</i>.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap39"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+There is so much to write about all at once. In the first place, Captain West.
+Not entirely unexpected was his death. Margaret tells me that she was
+apprehensive from the start of the voyage&mdash;and even before. It was because
+of her apprehension that she so abruptly changed her plans and accompanied her
+father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that it was some
+stroke of the heart. And yet, after the stroke, did he not come out on deck? Or
+could the first stroke have been followed by another and fatal one after I had
+helped him inside through the door? And even so, I have never heard of a
+heart-stroke being preceded hours before by a weakening of the mind. Captain
+West&rsquo;s mind seemed quite clear, and must have been quite clear, that last
+afternoon when he wore the <i>Elsinore</i> and started the lee-shore drift. In
+which case it was a blunder. The Samurai blundered, and his heart destroyed him
+when he became aware of the blunder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret&rsquo;s head. She
+accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the oncoming
+termination of his sickness. And no one will ever undeceive her. Neither Mr.
+Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention a whisper of what so
+narrowly missed causing disaster. In fact, Mr. Pike does not talk about the
+matter at all.&mdash;And then, again, might it not have been something
+different from heart disease? Or heart disease complicated with something else
+that obscured his mind that afternoon before his death? Well, no one knows, and
+I, for one, shall not sit, even in secret judgment, on the event.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the <i>Elsinore</i> was
+rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of miles off
+the land. Captain West was buried at four o&rsquo;clock, and at eight bells
+that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few remarks to both watches.
+They were straight-from-the-shoulder remarks, or, as he called them, they were
+&ldquo;brass tacks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss, and that
+they would toe the mark as they never had before. Up to this time they had been
+loafing in an hotel, but from this time on they were going to work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On this hooker, from now on,&rdquo; he perorated, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s
+going to be like old times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as
+well as the first. And God help the man that don&rsquo;t jump. That&rsquo;s
+all. Relieve the wheel and lookout.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition. I don&rsquo;t see how they
+can jump. Another week of westerly gales, alternating with brief periods of
+calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off the Horn. So weak are the
+men that they have no spirit left in them&mdash;not even the gangsters. And so
+afraid are they of the mate that they really do their best to jump when he
+drives them, and he drives them all the time. Mr. Mellaire shakes his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait till they get around and up into better weather,&rdquo; he
+astonished me by telling me the other afternoon. &ldquo;Wait till they get
+dried out, and rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more
+flesh on their bones, and more spunk in their blood&mdash;then they won&rsquo;t
+stand for this driving. Mr. Pike can&rsquo;t realize that times have changed,
+sir, and laws have changed, and men have changed. He&rsquo;s an old man, and I
+know what I am talking about.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean you&rsquo;ve been listening to the talk of the men?&rdquo; I
+challenged rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this
+ship&rsquo;s officer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of light
+vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching, fearful thing that
+lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to leap out at me, while the cruel
+gash of mouth drew thinner and crueller. And at the same time, on my inner
+sight, was grotesquely limned a picture of a brain pulsing savagely against the
+veneer of skin that covered that cleft of skull beneath the dripping
+sou&rsquo;-wester. Then he controlled himself, the mouth-gash relaxed, and the
+suave and gentle film drew again across the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean, sir,&rdquo; he said softly, &ldquo;that I am speaking out of a
+long sea experience. Times have changed. The old driving days are gone. And I
+trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the matter, nor
+misinterpret what I have said.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I could not
+ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the talk of the men. And
+yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is a good sailorman and second mate
+save for his unholy intimacy with the men for&rsquo;ard&mdash;an intimacy which
+even the Chinese cook and the Chinese steward deplore as unseamanlike and
+perilous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that they have
+no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest for&rsquo;ard who
+will not die, and who are as spunky as ever. They are Andy Fay, Mulligan
+Jacobs, and Charles Davis. What strange, abysmal vitality informs them is
+beyond all speculation. Of course, Charles Davis should have been overside with
+a sack of coal at his feet long ago. And Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only,
+and have always been, wrecked and emaciated wisps of men. Yet far stronger men
+than they have gone over the side, and far stronger men than they are laid up
+right now in absolute physical helplessness in the soggy forecastle bunks. And
+these two bitter flames of shreds of things stand all their watches and answer
+all calls for both watches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in them.
+Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed dripping on occasion by
+the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight through canvas tarpaulins,
+nevertheless not a chicken has died. Is it a matter of selection? Are these the
+iron-vigoured ones that survived the hardships from Baltimore to the Horn, and
+are fitted to survive anything? Then for a De Vries to take them, save them,
+and out of them found the hardiest breed of chickens on the planet! And after
+this I shall always query that phrase, most ancient in our
+language&mdash;&ldquo;chicken-hearted.&rdquo; Measured by the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> chickens, it is a misnomer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming, topaz
+eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest of the crew,
+aliens by lack of any word of common speech, nevertheless they are good sailors
+and are always first to spring into any enterprise of work or peril. They have
+gone into Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s watch, and they are quite apart from the rest of
+the sailors. And when there is a delay, or wait, with nothing to do for long
+minutes, they shoulder together, and stand and sway to the heave of deck, and
+dream far dreams in those pale, topaz eyes, of a country, I am sure, where
+mothers, with pale, topaz eyes and sandy hair, birth sons and daughters that
+breed true in terms of topaz eyes and sandy hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too keenly
+intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure. He is a shadow of
+his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark circles of suffering are under
+his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and English intermingled, are cavernously
+sunken and as bright-burning as if aflame with fever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long tried and
+always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit. He is whining and fearful. So broken
+is he, though he still does his work, that he is prideless and shameless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never ship around the Horn again, sir,&rdquo; he began on me
+the other day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+sworn it before, but this time I mean it. Never again, sir. Never again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why did you swear it before?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was on the <i>Nahoma</i>, sir, four years ago. Two hundred and thirty
+days from Liverpool to &rsquo;Frisco. Think of it, sir. Two hundred and thirty
+days! And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the creosote got loose.
+We buried the captain right here off the Horn. The grub gave out. Most of us
+nearly died of scurvy. Every man Jack of us was carted to hospital in
+&rsquo;Frisco. It was plain hell, sir, that&rsquo;s what it was, an&rsquo; two
+hundred and thirty days of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet here you are,&rdquo; I laughed; &ldquo;signed on another Horn
+voyage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If only we&rsquo;d lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered. The carpenter was
+the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with the winds and
+despitefully used poor sailormen.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this eternal
+buffeting by the Great West Wind. Nor are we alone in our travail on this
+desolate ocean. Never a day does the gray thin, or the snow-squalls cease that
+we do not sight ships, west-bound like ourselves, hove-to and trying to hold on
+to the meagre westing they possess. And occasionally, when the gray clears and
+lifts, we see a lucky ship, bound east, running before it and reeling off the
+miles. I saw Mr. Pike, yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at one
+such craft that flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the men are jumping. Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square fists of
+his, as many a man&rsquo;s face attests. So weak are they, and so terrible is
+he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-handed. I cannot help but
+note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take part in this driving. Yet I know that he
+is a trained driver, and that he was not averse to driving at the outset of the
+voyage. But now he seems bent on keeping on good terms with the crew. I should
+like to know what Mr. Pike thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be blind to
+what is going on; but I am too well aware of what would happen if I raised the
+question. He would insult me, snap my head off, and indulge in a
+three-days&rsquo; sea-grouch. Things are sad and monotonous enough for Margaret
+and me in the cabin and at table, without invoking the blight of the
+mate&rsquo;s displeasure.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap40"></a>CHAPTER XL.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated. From now on and for always these
+imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs. We are west of the Diego
+de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at a twelve-knot clip with an
+easterly gale at our backs. And the carpenter is gone. His passing, and the
+coming of the easterly wind, were coincidental.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was yesterday morning, as he helped me to dress, that I was struck by the
+solemnity of Wada&rsquo;s face. He shook his head lugubriously as he broke the
+news. The carpenter was missing. The ship had been searched for him high and
+low. There just was no carpenter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does the steward think?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;What does Louis
+think?&mdash;and Yatsuda?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The sailors, they kill &rsquo;m carpenter sure,&rdquo; was the answer.
+&ldquo;Very bad ship this. Very bad hearts. Just the same pig, just the same
+dog. All the time kill. All the time kill. Bime-by everybody kill. You
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old steward, at work in his pantry, grinned at me when I mentioned the
+matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They make fool with me, I fix &rsquo;em,&rdquo; he said vindictively.
+&ldquo;Mebbe they kill me, all right; but I kill some, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his body, in a
+canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a meat knife of the heavy
+sort that butchers hack with. He drew it forth&mdash;it was fully two feet
+long&mdash;and, to demonstrate its razor-edge, sliced a sheet of newspaper into
+many ribbons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh!&rdquo; he laughed sardonically. &ldquo;I am Chink, monkey, damn
+fool, eh?&mdash;no good, eh? all rotten damn to hell. I fix &rsquo;em, they
+make fool with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play. Nobody knows what
+happened to the carpenter. There are no clues, no traces. The night was calm
+and snowy. No seas broke on board. Without doubt the clumsy, big-footed,
+over-grown giant of a boy is overside and dead. The question is: did he go over
+of his own accord, or was he put over?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At eight o&rsquo;clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches. He stood
+at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the rail and gazing
+down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story. They knew no
+more about it than did we&mdash;or so they averred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ll be chargin&rsquo; next that I hove that big
+lummux overboard with me own hands,&rdquo; Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was
+questioned. &ldquo;An&rsquo; mebbe I did, bein&rsquo; that husky an&rsquo;
+rampagin&rsquo; bull-like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate&rsquo;s face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
+passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an unforgettable scene&mdash;the mate in the high place, the men, sullen
+and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight down through
+the windless air, while the <i>Elsinore</i>, with hollow thunder from her
+sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped the mouths of
+her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs. And all the men swayed
+in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped
+sea-boots, their faces worn and sick. And the three dreamers with the topaz
+eyes stood and swayed and dreamed together, incurious of setting and situation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then it came&mdash;the hint of easterly air. The mate noted it first. I saw
+him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible draught. Then I felt
+it. A minute longer he waited, until assured, when, the dead carpenter
+forgotten, he burst out with orders to the wheel and the crew. And the men
+jumped, though in their weakness the climb aloft was slow and toilsome; and
+when the gaskets were off the topgallant-sails and the men on deck were
+hoisting yards and sheeting home, those aloft were loosing the royals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced around, the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, her bow pointing to the west, began moving through the water
+before the first fair wind in a month and a half.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time the snow
+fell steadily. The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to fall, and the breeze
+continued to grow upon itself. Tom Spink, passing by me on the poop to lend a
+hand at the final finicky trimming of the mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant
+look. Superstition was vindicated. Events had proved him right. Fair wind had
+come with the going of the carpenter, which said warlock had incontestably
+taken with him overside his bag of wind-tricks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was too
+disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself, glancing at
+the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern into the gray of snow out
+of which blew the favouring wind. He even paused beside me to gossip for a
+moment about the French restaurants of San Francisco and how, therein, the
+delectable California fashion of cooking wild duck obtained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Throw &rsquo;em through the fire,&rdquo; he chanted. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+the way&mdash;throw &rsquo;em through the fire&mdash;a hot oven, sixteen
+minutes&mdash;I take mine fourteen, to the second&mdash;an&rsquo; squeeze the
+carcasses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff breeze.
+At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing gale. It was across
+a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting sea that made from eastward bucked into
+the West End Drift and battled and battered down the huge south-westerly swell.
+And the big grinning dolt of a Finnish carpenter, already food for fish and
+bird, was astern there somewhere in the freezing rack and drive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Make westing! We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of longitude at
+the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for two. And Mr. Pike,
+staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore that they could carry away for
+all he cared ere he eased an inch of canvas. More he did. He set the huge
+crojack, biggest of all sails, and challenged God or Satan to start a seam of
+it or all its seams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He simply could not go below. In such auspicious occasions all watches were
+his, and he strode the poop perpetually with all age-lag banished from his
+legs. Margaret and I were with him in the chart-room when he hurrahed the
+barometer, down to 28.55 and falling. And we were near him, on the poop, when
+he drove by an east-bound lime-juicer, hove-to under upper-topsails. We were a
+biscuit-toss away, and he sprang upon the rail at the jigger-shrouds and danced
+a war-dance and waved his free arm, and yelled his scorn and joy at their
+discomfiture to the several oilskinned figures on the stranger vessel&rsquo;s
+poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the pitch-black night we continued to drive. The crew was sadly
+frightened, and I sought in vain, in the two dog-watches, for Tom Spink, to ask
+him if he thought the carpenter, astern, had opened wide the bag-mouth and
+loosed all his tricks. For the first time I saw the steward apprehensive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much,&rdquo; he told me, with ominous rolling head. &ldquo;Too much
+sail, rotten bad damn all to hell. Bime-by, pretty quick, all finish. You
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They talk about running the easting down,&rdquo; Mr. Pike chortled to
+me, as we clung to the poop-rail to keep from fetching away and breaking ribs
+and necks. &ldquo;Well, this is running your westing down if anybody should
+ride up in a go-devil and ask you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a wretched, glorious night. Sleep was impossible&mdash;for me, at any
+rate. Nor was there even the comfort of warmth. Something had gone wrong with
+the big cabin stove, due to our wild running, I fancy, and the steward was
+compelled to let the fire go out. So we are getting a taste of the hardship of
+the forecastle, though in our case everything is dry instead of soggy or
+afloat. The kerosene stoves burned in our staterooms, but so smelly was mine
+that I preferred the cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To sail on one&rsquo;s nerve in an over-canvassed harbour cat-boat is all the
+excitement any glutton can desire. But to sail, in the same fashion, in a big
+ship off the Horn, is incredible and terrible. The Great West Wind Drift,
+setting squarely into the teeth of the easterly gale, kicked up a tideway sea
+that was monstrous. Two men toiled at the wheel, relieving in pairs every
+half-hour, and in the face of the cold they streamed with sweat long ere their
+half-hour shift was up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike is of the elder race of men. His endurance is prodigious. Watch and
+watch, and all watches, he held the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never dreamed of it,&rdquo; he told me, at midnight, as the great
+gusts tore by and as we listened for our lighter spars to smash aloft and crash
+upon the deck. &ldquo;I thought my last whirling sailing was past. And here we
+are! Here we are!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lord! Lord! I sailed third mate in the little <i>Vampire</i> before you
+were born. Fifty-six men before the mast, and the last Jack of &rsquo;em an
+able seaman. And there were eight boys, an&rsquo; bosuns that was bosuns,
+an&rsquo; sail-makers an&rsquo; carpenters an&rsquo; stewards an&rsquo;
+passengers to jam the decks. An&rsquo; three driving mates of us, an&rsquo;
+Captain Brown, the Little Wonder. He didn&rsquo;t weigh a hundredweight,
+an&rsquo; he drove us&mdash;he drove <i>us</i>, three drivin&rsquo; mates that
+learned from him what drivin&rsquo; was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was knock down and drag out from the start. The first hour of
+puttin&rsquo; the men to fair perished our knuckles. I&rsquo;ve got the smashed
+joints yet to show. Every sea-chest broke open, every sea-bag turned out, and
+whiskey bottles, knuckle-dusters, sling-shots, bowie-knives, an&rsquo; guns
+chucked overside by the armful. An&rsquo; when we chose the watches, each man
+of fifty-six of &rsquo;em laid his knife on the main-hatch an&rsquo; the
+carpenter broke the point square off.&mdash;Yes, an&rsquo; the little
+<i>Vampire</i> only eight hundred tons. The <i>Elsinore</i> could carry her on
+her deck. But she was ship, all ship, an&rsquo; them was men&rsquo;s
+days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret, save for inability to sleep, did not mind the driving, although Mr.
+Mellaire, on the other hand, admitted apprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s got my goat,&rdquo; he confided to me. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t
+right to drive a cargo-carrier this way. This isn&rsquo;t a ballasted yacht.
+It&rsquo;s a coal-hulk. I know what driving was, but it was in ships made to
+drive. Our iron-work aloft won&rsquo;t stand it. Mr. Pathurst, I tell you
+frankly that it is criminal, it is sheer murder, to run the <i>Elsinore</i>
+with that crojack on her. You can see yourself, sir. It&rsquo;s an after-sail.
+All its tendency is to throw her stern off and her bow up to it. And if it ever
+happens, sir, if she ever gets away from the wheel for two seconds and broaches
+to . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then what?&rdquo; I asked, or, rather, shouted; for all conversation had
+to be shouted close to ear in that blast of gale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged his shoulders, and all of him was eloquent with the unuttered,
+unmistakable word&mdash;&ldquo;finish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At eight this morning Margaret and I struggled up to the poop. And there was
+that indomitable, iron old man. He had never left the deck all night. His eyes
+were bright, and he appeared in the pink of well-being. He rubbed his hands and
+chuckled greeting to us, and took up his reminiscences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In &rsquo;51, on this same stretch, Miss West, the <i>Flying Cloud</i>,
+in twenty-four hours, logged three hundred and seventy-four miles under her
+topgallant-sails. That was sailing. She broke the record, that day, for sail
+an&rsquo; steam.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what are we averaging, Mr. Pike?&rdquo; Margaret queried, while her
+eyes were fixed on the main deck, where continually one rail and then the other
+dipped under the ocean and filled across from rail to rail, only to spill out
+and take in on the next roll.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thirteen for a fair average since five o&rsquo;clock yesterday
+afternoon,&rdquo; he exulted. &ldquo;In the squalls she makes all of sixteen,
+which is going some, for the <i>Elsinore</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d take the crojack off if I had charge,&rdquo; Margaret
+criticised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So would I, so would I, Miss West,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;if we
+hadn&rsquo;t been six weeks already off the Horn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel to the
+wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some invisible
+archer&rsquo;s hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re remarkably good sticks of timber,&rdquo; was her comment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well may you say it, Miss West,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d never
+a-believed they&rsquo;d a-stood it myself. But just look at &rsquo;m! Just look
+at &rsquo;m!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no breakfast for the men. Three times the galley had been washed out,
+and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented themselves with hard tack and
+cold salt horse. Aft, with us, the steward scalded himself twice ere he
+succeeded in making coffee over a kerosene-burner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the same
+direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail. The only one of her
+courses set was the foresail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The way that skipper&rsquo;s carryin&rsquo; on is shocking,&rdquo; Mr.
+Pike sneered. &ldquo;He should be more cautious, and remember God, the owners,
+the underwriters, and the Board of Trade.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was our speed that in almost no time we were up with the stranger vessel
+and passing her. Mr. Pike was like a boy just loosed from school. He altered
+our course so that we passed her a hundred yards away. She was a gallant sight,
+but, such was our speed, she appeared standing still. Mr. Pike jumped upon the
+rail and insulted those on her poop by extending a rope&rsquo;s end in
+invitation to take a tow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret shook her head privily to me as she gazed at our bending royal-yards,
+but was caught in the act by Mr. Pike, who cried out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What kites she won&rsquo;t carry she can drag!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later I caught Tom Spink, just relieved from his shift at the wheel and
+weak from exhaustion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think now of the carpenter and his bag of tricks?&rdquo; I
+queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lord lumme, it should a-ben the mate, sir,&rdquo; was his reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By five in the afternoon we had logged 314 miles since five the previous day,
+which was two over an average of thirteen knots for twenty-four consecutive
+hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now take Captain Brown of the little <i>Vampire</i>,&rdquo; Mr. Pike
+grinned to me, for our sailing made him good-natured. &ldquo;He never would
+take in until the kites an&rsquo; stu&rsquo;n&rsquo;sails was about his ears.
+An&rsquo; when she was blown&rsquo; her worst an&rsquo; we was half-fairly
+shortened down, he&rsquo;d turn in for a snooze, an&rsquo; say to us,
+&lsquo;Call me if she moderates.&rsquo; Yes, and I&rsquo;ll never forget the
+night when I called him an&rsquo; told him that everything on top the houses
+had gone adrift, an&rsquo; that two of the boats had been swept aft and was
+kindling-wood against the break of the cabin. &lsquo;Very well, Mr.
+Pike,&rsquo; he says, battin&rsquo; his eyes and turnin&rsquo; over to go to
+sleep again. &lsquo;Very well, Mr. Pike,&rsquo; says he. &lsquo;Watch her.
+An&rsquo; Mr. Pike . . .&rsquo; &lsquo;Yes, sir,&rsquo; says I. &lsquo;Give me
+a call, Mr. Pike, when the windlass shows signs of comin&rsquo; aft.&rsquo;
+That&rsquo;s what he said, his very words, an&rsquo; the next moment, damme, he
+was snorin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is now midnight, and, cunningly wedged into my bunk, unable to sleep, I am
+writing these lines with flying dabs of pencil at my pad. And no more shall I
+write, I swear, until this gale is blown out, or we are blown to Kingdom Come.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap41"></a>CHAPTER XLI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The days have passed and I have broken my resolve; for here I am again writing
+while the <i>Elsinore</i> surges along across a magnificent, smoky, dusty sea.
+But I have two reasons for breaking my word. First, and minor, we had a real
+dawn this morning. The gray of the sea showed a streaky blue, and the
+cloud-masses were actually pink-tipped by a really and truly sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Second, and major, <i>we are around the Horn</i>! We are north of 50 in the
+Pacific, in Longitude 80.49, with Cape Pillar and the Straits of Magellan
+already south of east from us, and we are heading north-north-west. <i>We are
+around the Horn</i>! The profound significance of this can be appreciated only
+by one who has wind-jammed around from east to west. Blow high, blow low,
+nothing can happen to thwart us. No ship north of 50 was ever blown back. From
+now on it is plain sailing, and Seattle suddenly seems quite near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the ship&rsquo;s company, with the exception of Margaret, is better
+spirited. She is quiet, and a little down, though she is anything but prone to
+the wastage of grief. In her robust, vital philosophy God&rsquo;s always in
+heaven. I may describe her as being merely subdued, and gentle, and tender. And
+she is very wistful to receive gentle consideration and tenderness from me. She
+is, after all, the genuine woman. She wants the strength that man has to give,
+and I flatter myself that I am ten times a stronger man than I was when the
+voyage began, because I am a thousand times a more human man since I told the
+books to go hang and began to revel in the human maleness of the man that loves
+a woman and is loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returning to the ship&rsquo;s company. The rounding of the Horn, the better
+weather that is continually growing better, the easement of hardship and toil
+and danger, with the promise of the tropics and of the balmy south-east trades
+before them&mdash;all these factors contribute to pick up our men again. The
+temperature has already so moderated that the men are beginning to shed their
+surplusage of clothing, and they no longer wrap sacking about their sea-boots.
+Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I heard a man actually singing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward has discarded the huge, hacking knife and relaxed to the extent of
+engaging in an occasional sober romp with Possum. Wada&rsquo;s face is no
+longer solemnly long, and Louis&rsquo; Oxford accent is more mellifluous than
+ever. Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay are the same venomous scorpions they have
+always been. The three gangsters, with the clique they lead, have again
+asserted their tyrrany and thrashed all the weaklings and feeblings in the
+forecastle. Charles Davis resolutely refuses to die, though how he survived
+that wet and freezing room of iron through all the weeks off the Horn has
+elicited wonder even from Mr. Pike, who has a most accurate knowledge of what
+men can stand and what they cannot stand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How Nietzsche, with his eternal slogan of &ldquo;Be hard! Be hard!&rdquo; would
+have delighted in Mr. Pike!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And&mdash;oh!&mdash;Larry has had a tooth removed. For some days distressed
+with a jumping toothache, he came aft to the mate for relief. Mr. Pike refused
+to &ldquo;monkey&rdquo; with the &ldquo;fangled&rdquo; forceps in the
+medicine-chest. He used a tenpenny nail and a hammer in the good old way to
+which he was brought up. I vouch for this. I saw it done. One blow of the
+hammer and the tooth was out, while Larry was jumping around holding his jaw.
+It is a wonder it wasn&rsquo;t fractured. But Mr. Pike avers he has removed
+hundreds of teeth by this method and never known a fractured jaw. Also, he
+avers he once sailed with a skipper who shaved every Sunday morning and never
+touched a razor, nor any cutting-edge, to his face. What he used, according to
+Mr. Pike, was a lighted candle and a damp towel. Another candidate for
+Nietzsche&rsquo;s immortals who are hard!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Mr. Pike himself, he is the highest-spirited, best-conditioned man on
+board. The driving to which he subjected the <i>Elsinore</i> was meat and
+drink. He still rubs his hands and chuckles over the memory of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh!&rdquo; he said to me, in reference to the crew; &ldquo;I gave
+&rsquo;em a taste of real old-fashioned sailing. They&rsquo;ll never forget
+this hooker&mdash;at least them that don&rsquo;t take a sack of coal overside
+before we reach port.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean you think we&rsquo;ll have more sea-burials?&rdquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned squarely upon me, and squarely looked me in the eyes for the matter
+of five long seconds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh!&rdquo; he replied, as he turned on his heel. &ldquo;Hell
+ain&rsquo;t begun to pop on this hooker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He still stands his mate&rsquo;s watch, alternating with Mr. Mellaire, for he
+is firm in his conviction that there is no man for&rsquo;ard fit to stand a
+second mate&rsquo;s watch. Also, he has kept his old quarters. Perhaps it is
+out of delicacy for Margaret; for I have learned that it is the invariable
+custom for the mate to occupy the captain&rsquo;s quarters when the latter
+dies. So Mr. Mellaire still eats by himself in the big after-room, as he has
+done since the loss of the carpenter, and bunks as before in the
+&rsquo;midship-house with Nancy.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap42"></a>CHAPTER XLII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Mellaire was right. The men would not accept the driving when the
+<i>Elsinore</i> won to easier latitudes. Mr. Pike was right. Hell had not begun
+to pop. But it has popped now, and men are overboard without even the
+kindliness of a sack of coal at their feet. And yet the men, though ripe for
+it, did not precipitate the trouble. It was Mr. Mellaire. Or, rather, it was
+Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian. Perhaps it was Possum. At any rate,
+it was an accident, in which the several-named, including Possum, played their
+respective parts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To begin at the beginning. Two weeks have elapsed since we crossed 50, and we
+are now in 37&mdash;the same latitude as San Francisco, or, to be correct, we
+are as far south of the equator as San Francisco is north of it. The trouble
+was precipitated yesterday morning shortly after nine o&rsquo;clock, and Possum
+started the chain of events that culminated in downright mutiny. It was Mr.
+Mellaire&rsquo;s watch, and he was standing on the bridge, directly under the
+mizzen-top, giving orders to Sundry Buyers, who, with Arthur Deacon and the
+Maltese Cockney, was doing rigging work aloft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Get the picture and the situation in all its ridiculousness. Mr. Pike,
+thermometer in hand, was coming back along the bridge from taking the
+temperature of the coal in the for&rsquo;ard hold. Ditman Olansen was just
+swinging into the mizzen-top as he went up with several turns of rope over one
+shoulder. Also, in some way, to the end of this rope was fastened a sizable
+block that might have weighed ten pounds. Possum, running free, was fooling
+around the chicken-coop on top the &rsquo;midship-house. And the chickens,
+featherless but indomitable, were enjoying the milder weather as they pecked at
+the grain and grits which the steward had just placed in their feeding-trough.
+The tarpaulin that covered their pen had been off for several days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now observe. I am at the break of the poop, leaning on the rail and watching
+Ditman Olansen swing into the top with his cumbersome burden. Mr. Pike,
+proceeding aft, has just passed Mr. Mellaire. Possum, who, on account of the
+Horn weather and the tarpaulin, has not seen the chickens for many weeks, is
+getting reacquainted, and is investigating them with that keen nose of his. And
+a hen&rsquo;s beak, equally though differently keen, impacts on Possum&rsquo;s
+nose, which is as sensitive as it is keen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I may well say, now that I think it over, that it was this particular hen that
+started the mutiny. The men, well-driven by Mr. Pike, were ripe for an
+explosion, and Possum and the hen laid the train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Possum fell away backwards from the coop and loosed a wild cry of pain and
+indignation. This attracted Ditman Olansen&rsquo;s attention. He paused and
+craned his neck out in order to see, and, in this moment of carelessness, the
+block he was carrying fetched away from him along with the several turns of
+rope around his shoulder. Both the mates sprang away to get out from under. The
+rope, fast to the block and following it, lashed about like a blacksnake, and,
+though the block fell clear of Mr. Mellaire, the bight of the rope snatched off
+his cap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike had already started an oath aloft when his eyes caught sight of the
+terrible cleft in Mr. Mellaire&rsquo;s head. There it was, for all the world to
+read, and Mr. Pike&rsquo;s and mine were the only eyes that could read it. The
+sparse hair upon the second mate&rsquo;s crown served not at all to hide the
+cleft. It began out of sight in the thicker hair above the ears, and was
+exposed nakedly across the whole dome of head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stream of abuse for Ditman Olansen was choked in Mr. Pike&rsquo;s throat.
+All he was capable of for the moment was to stare, petrified, at that enormous
+fissure flanked at either end with a thatch of grizzled hair. He was in a
+dream, a trance, his great hands knotting and clenching unconsciously as he
+stared at the mark unmistakable by which he had said that he would some day
+identify the murderer of Captain Somers. And in that moment I remembered having
+heard him declare that some day he would stick his fingers in that mark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still as in a dream, moving slowly, right hand outstretched like a talon, with
+the fingers drawn downward, he advanced on the second mate with the evident
+intention of thrusting his fingers into that cleft and of clawing and tearing
+at the brain-life beneath that pulsed under the thin film of skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second mate backed away along the bridge, and Mr. Pike seemed partially to
+come to himself. His outstretched arm dropped to his side, and he paused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know you,&rdquo; he said, in a strange, shaky voice, blended of age
+and passion. &ldquo;Eighteen years ago you were dismasted off the Plate in the
+<i>Cyrus Thompson</i>. She foundered, after you were on your beam ends and lost
+your sticks. You were in the only boat that was saved. Eleven years ago, on the
+<i>Jason Harrison</i>, in San Francisco, Captain Somers was beaten to death by
+his second mate. This second mate was a survivor of the <i>Cyrus Thompson</i>.
+This second mate&rsquo;d had his skull split by a crazy sea-cook. Your skull is
+split. This second mate&rsquo;s name was Sidney Waltham. And if you ain&rsquo;t
+Sidney Waltham . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this point Mr. Mellaire, or, rather, Sidney Waltham, despite his fifty
+years, did what only a sailor could do. He went over the bridge-rail side-wise,
+caught the running gear up-and-down the mizzen-mast, and landed lightly on his
+feet on top of Number Three hatch. Nor did he stop there. He ran across the
+hatch and dived through the doorway of his room in the &rsquo;midship-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such must have been Mr. Pike&rsquo;s profundity of passion, that he paused like
+a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and seemed
+to awaken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the second mate had not run to his room for refuge. The next moment he
+emerged, a thirty-two Smith and Wesson in his hand, and the instant he emerged
+he began shooting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was wholly himself again, and I saw him perceptibly pause and decide
+between the two impulses that tore at him. One was to leap over the bridge-rail
+and down at the man who shot at him; the other was to retreat. He retreated.
+And as he bounded aft along the narrow bridge the mutiny began. Arthur Deacon,
+from the mizzen-top, leaned out and hurled a steel marlin-spike at the fleeing
+mate. The thing flashed in the sunlight as it hurtled down. It missed Mr. Pike
+by twenty feet and nearly impaled Possum, who, afraid of firearms, was wildly
+rushing and ki-yi-ing aft. It so happened that the sharp point of the
+marlin-spike struck the wooden floor of the bridge, and it penetrated the
+planking with such force that after it had fetched to a standstill it vibrated
+violently for long seconds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I confess that I failed to observe a tithe of what occurred during the next
+several minutes. Piece together as I will, after the event, I know that I
+missed much of what took place. I know that the men aloft in the mizzen
+descended to the deck, but I never saw them descend. I know that the second
+mate emptied the chambers of his revolver, but I did not hear all the shots. I
+know that Lars Johnson left the wheel, and on his broken leg, rebroken and not
+yet really mended, limped and scuttled across the poop, down the ladder, and
+gained for&rsquo;ard. I know he must have limped and scuttled on that bad leg
+of his; I know that I must have seen him; and yet I swear that I have no
+impression of seeing him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do know that I heard the rush of feet of men from for&rsquo;ard along the
+main deck. And I do know that I saw Mr. Pike take shelter behind the steel
+jiggermast. Also, as the second mate manoeuvred to port on top of Number Three
+hatch for his last shot, I know that I saw Mr. Pike duck around the corner of
+the chart-house to starboard and get away aft and below by way of the
+booby-hatch. And I did hear that last futile shot, and the bullet also as it
+ricochetted from the corner of the steel-walled chart-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for myself, I did not move. I was too interested in seeing. It may have been
+due to lack of presence of mind, or to lack of habituation to an active part in
+scenes of quick action; but at any rate I merely retained my position at the
+break of the poop and looked on. I was the only person on the poop when the
+mutineers, led by the second mate and the gangsters, rushed it. I saw them
+swarm up the ladder, and it never entered my head to attempt to oppose them.
+Which was just as well, for I would have been killed for my pains, and I could
+never have stopped them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was alone on the poop, and the men were quite perplexed to find no enemy in
+sight. As Bert Rhine went past, he half fetched up in his stride, as if to
+knife me with the sheath knife, sharp-pointed, which he carried in his right
+hand; then, and I know I correctly measured the drift of his judgment, he
+unflatteringly dismissed me as unimportant and ran on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Right here I was impressed by the lack of clear-thinking on any of their parts.
+So spontaneously had the ship&rsquo;s company exploded into mutiny that it was
+dazed and confused even while it acted. For instance, in the months since we
+left Baltimore there had never been a moment, day or night, even when preventer
+tackles were rigged, that a man had not stood at the wheel. So habituated were
+they to this, that they were shocked into consternation at sight of the
+deserted wheel. They paused for an instant to stare at it. Then Bert Rhine,
+with a quick word and gesture, sent the Italian, Guido Bombini, around the rear
+of the half-wheelhouse. The fact that he completed the circuit was proof that
+nobody was there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, in the swift rush of events, I must confess that I saw but little. I was
+aware that more of the men were climbing up the ladder and gaining the poop,
+but I had no eyes for them. I was watching that sanguinary group aft near the
+wheel and noting the most important thing, namely, that it was Bert Rhine, the
+gangster, and not the second mate, who gave orders and was obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He motioned to the Jew, Isaac Chantz, who had been wounded earlier in the
+voyage by O&rsquo;Sullivan, and Chantz led the way to the starboard chart-house
+door. While this was going on, all in flashing fractions of seconds, Bert Rhine
+was cautiously inspecting the lazarette through the open booby-hatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Isaac Chantz jerked open the chart-house door, which swung outward. Things did
+happen so swiftly! As he jerked the iron door open a two-foot hacking butcher
+knife, at the end of a withered, yellow hand, flashed out and down on him. It
+missed head and neck, but caught him on top of the left shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All hands recoiled before this, and the Jew reeled across to the rail, his
+right hand clutching at his wound, and between the fingers I could see the
+blood welling darkly. Bert Rhine abandoned his inspection of the booby-hatch,
+and, with the second mate, the latter still carrying his empty Smith &amp;
+Wesson, sprang into the press about the chart-house door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O wise, clever, cautious, old Chinese steward! He made no emergence. The door
+swung emptily back and forth to the rolling of the <i>Elsinore</i>, and no man
+knew but what, just inside, with that heavy, hacking knife upraised, lurked the
+steward. And while they hesitated and stared at the aperture that alternately
+closed and opened with the swinging of the door, the booby-hatch, situated
+between chart-house and wheel, erupted. It was Mr. Pike, with his .44 automatic
+Colt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were shots fired, other than by him. I know I heard them, like
+&ldquo;red-heads&rdquo; at an old-time Fourth of July; but I do not know who
+discharged them. All was mess and confusion. Many shots were being fired, and
+through the uproar I heard the reiterant, monotonous explosions from the
+Colt&rsquo;s .44
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw the Italian, Mike Cipriani, clutch savagely at his abdomen and sink
+slowly to the deck. Shorty, the Japanese half-caste, clown that he was, dancing
+and grinning on the outskirts of the struggle, with a final grimace and
+hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop and down the poop-ladder.
+Never had I seen a finer exemplification of mob psychology. Shorty, the most
+unstable-minded of the individuals who composed this mob, by his own
+instability precipitated the retreat in which the mob joined. When he broke
+before the steady discharge of the automatic in the hand of the mate, on the
+instant the rest broke with him. Least-balanced, his balance was the balance of
+all of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chantz, bleeding prodigiously, was one of the first on Shorty&rsquo;s heels. I
+saw Nosey Murphy pause long enough to throw his knife at the mate. The missile
+went wide, with a metallic clang struck the brass tip of one of the spokes of
+the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> wheel, and clattered on the deck. The second mate,
+with his empty revolver, and Bert Rhine with his sheath-knife, fled past me
+side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike emerged from the booby-hatch and with an unaimed shot brought down
+Bill Quigley, one of the &ldquo;bricklayers,&rdquo; who fell at my feet. The
+last man off the poop was the Maltese Cockney, and at the top of the ladder he
+paused to look back at Mr. Pike, who, holding the automatic in both hands, was
+taking careful aim. The Maltese Cockney, disdaining the ladder, leaped through
+the air to the main deck. But the Colt merely clicked. It was the last bullet
+in it that had fetched down Bill Quigley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the poop was ours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Events still crowded so closely that I missed much. I saw the steward,
+belligerent and cautious, his long knife poised for a slash, emerge from the
+chart-house. Margaret followed him, and behind her came Wada, who carried my
+.22 Winchester automatic rifle. As he told me afterwards, he had brought it up
+under instructions from her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike was glancing with cool haste at his Colt to see whether it was jammed
+or empty, when Margaret asked him the course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the wind,&rdquo; he shouted to her, as he bounded for&rsquo;ard.
+&ldquo;Put your helm hard up or we&rsquo;ll be all aback.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah!&mdash;yeoman and henchman of the race, he could not fail in his fidelity to
+the ship under his command. The iron of all his years of iron training was
+there manifest. While mutiny spread red, and death was on the wing, he could
+not forget his charge, the ship, the <i>Elsinore</i>, the insensate fabric
+compounded of steel and hemp and woven cotton that was to him glorious with
+personality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret waved Wada in my direction as she ran to the wheel. As Mr. Pike passed
+the corner of the chart-house, simultaneously there was a report from amidships
+and the ping of a bullet against the steel wall. I saw the man who fired the
+shot. It was the cowboy, Steve Roberts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the mate, he ducked in behind the sheltering jiggermast, and even as he
+ducked his left hand dipped into his side coat-pocket, so that when he had
+gained shelter it was coming out with a fresh clip of cartridges. The empty
+clip fell to the deck, the loaded clip slipped up the hollow butt, and he was
+good for eight more shots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wada turned the little automatic rifle over to me, where I still stood under
+the weather cloth at the break of the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All ready,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You take off safety.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get Roberts,&rdquo; Mr. Pike called to me. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s the best
+shot for&rsquo;ard. If you can&rsquo;t get &rsquo;m, jolt the fear of God into
+him anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the first time I had a human target, and let me say, here and now, that
+I am convinced I am immune to buck fever. There he was before me, less than a
+hundred feet distant, in the gangway between the door to Davis&rsquo; room and
+the starboard-rail, manoeuvring for another shot at Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I must have missed Steve Roberts that first time, but I came so near him that
+he jumped. The next instant he had located me and turned his revolver on me.
+But he had no chance. My little automatic was discharging as fast as I could
+tickle the trigger with my fore-finger. The cowboy&rsquo;s first shot went wild
+of me, because my bullet arrived ere he got his swift aim. He swayed and
+stumbled backward, but the bullets&mdash;ten of them&mdash;poured from the
+muzzle of my Winchester like water from a garden hose. It was a stream of lead
+I played upon him. I shall never know how many times I hit him, but I am
+confident that after he had begun his long staggering fall at least three
+additional bullets entered him ere he impacted on the deck. And even as he was
+falling, aimlessly and mechanically, stricken then with death, he managed twice
+again to discharge his weapon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And after he struck the deck he never moved. I do believe he died in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I held up my gun and gazed at the abruptly-deserted main-deck I was aware of
+Wada&rsquo;s touch on my arm. I looked. In his hand were a dozen little .22
+long, soft-nosed, smokeless cartridges. He wanted me to reload. I threw on the
+safety, opened the magazine, and tilted the rifle so that he could let the
+fresh cartridges of themselves slide into place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get some more,&rdquo; I told him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely had he departed on the errand when Bill Quigley, who lay at my feet,
+created a diversion. I jumped&mdash;yes, and I freely confess that I
+yelled&mdash;with startle and surprise, when I felt his paws clutch my ankles
+and his teeth shut down on the calf of my leg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Mr. Pike to the rescue. I understand now the Western hyperbole of
+&ldquo;hitting the high places.&rdquo; The mate did not seem in contact with
+the deck. My impression was that he soared through the air to me, landing
+beside me, and, in the instant of landing, kicking out with one of those big
+feet of his. Bill Quigley was kicked clear away from me, and the next moment he
+was flying overboard. It was a clean throw. He never touched the rail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether Mike Cipriani, who, till then, had lain in a welter, began crawling aft
+in quest of safety, or whether he intended harm to Margaret at the wheel, we
+shall never know; for there was no opportunity given him to show his purpose.
+As swiftly as Mr. Pike could cross the deck with those giant bounds, just that
+swiftly was the Italian in the air and following Bill Quigley overside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate missed nothing with those eagle eyes of his as he returned along the
+poop. Nobody was to be seen on the main deck. Even the lookout had deserted the
+forecastle-head, and the <i>Elsinore</i>, steered by Margaret, slipped a lazy
+two knots through the quiet sea. Mr. Pike was apprehensive of a shot from
+ambush, and it was not until after a scrutiny of several minutes that he put
+his pistol into his side coat-pocket and snarled for&rsquo;ard:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come out, you rats! Show your ugly faces! I want to talk with
+you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Guido Bombini, gesticulating peaceable intentions and evidently thrust out by
+Bert Rhine, was the first to appear. When it was observed that Mr. Pike did not
+fire, the rest began to dribble into view. This continued till all were there
+save the cook, the two sail-makers, and the second mate. The last to come out
+were Tom Spink, the boy Buckwheat, and Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured
+but simple-minded German; and these three came out only after repeated threats
+from Bert Rhine, who, with Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist, was patently in charge.
+Also, like a faithful dog, Guido Bombini fawned close to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That will do&mdash;stop where you are,&rdquo; Mr. Pike commanded, when
+the crew was scattered abreast, to starboard and to port, of Number Three
+hatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a striking scene. <i>Mutiny on the high seas</i>! That phrase, learned
+in boyhood from my Marryatt and Cooper, recrudesced in my brain. This was
+it&mdash;mutiny on the high seas in the year nineteen thirteen&mdash;and I was
+part of it, a perishing blond whose lot was cast with the perishing but lordly
+blonds, and I had already killed a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike, in the high place, aged and indomitable; leaned his arm on the rail
+at the break of the poop and gazed down at the mutineers, the like of which
+I&rsquo;ll wager had never been assembled in mutiny before. There were the
+three gangsters and ex-jailbirds, anything but seamen, yet in control of this
+affair that was peculiarly an affair of the sea. With them was the Italian
+hound, Bombini, and beside them were such strangely assorted men as Anton
+Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, Frank Fitzgibbon, and Richard Giller&mdash;also Arthur
+Deacon the white slaver, John Hackey the San Francisco hoodlum, the Maltese
+Cockney, and Tony the suicidal Greek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I noticed the three strange ones, shouldering together and standing apart from
+the others as they swayed to the lazy roll and dreamed with their pale, topaz
+eyes. And there was the Faun, stone deaf but observant, straining to understand
+what was taking place. Yes, and Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay were bitterly and
+eagerly side by side, and Ditman Olansen, crank-eyed, as if drawn by some
+affinity of bitterness, stood behind them, his head appearing between their
+heads. Farthest advanced of all was Charles Davis, the man who by all rights
+should long since be dead, his face with its wax-like pallor startlingly in
+contrast to the weathered faces of the rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I glanced back at Margaret, who was coolly steering, and she smiled to me, and
+love was in her eyes&mdash;she, too, of the perishing and lordly race of
+blonds, her place the high place, her heritage government and command and
+mastery over the stupid lowly of her kind and over the ruck and spawn of the
+dark-pigmented breeds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Sidney Waltham?&rdquo; the mate snarled. &ldquo;I want
+him. Bring him out. After that, the rest of you filth get back to work, or God
+have mercy on you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The men moved about restlessly, shuffling their feet on the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sidney Waltham, I want you&mdash;come out!&rdquo; Mr. Pike called,
+addressing himself beyond them to the murderer of the captain under whom once
+he had sailed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prodigious old hero! It never entered his head that he was not the master
+of the rabble there below him. He had but one idea, an idea of passion, and
+that was his desire for vengeance on the murderer of his old skipper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You old stiff!&rdquo; Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up, Mulligan!&rdquo; was Bert Rhine&rsquo;s command, in receipt of
+which he received a venomous stare from the cripple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, ho, my hearty,&rdquo; Mr. Pike sneered at the gangster.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll take care of your case, never fear. In the meantime, and
+right now, fetch out that dog.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whereupon he ignored the leader of the mutineers and began calling,
+&ldquo;Waltham, you dog, come out! Come out, you sneaking cur! Come out!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Another lunatic</i>, was the thought that flashed through my mind; another
+lunatic, the slave of a single idea. He forgets the mutiny, his fidelity to the
+ship, in his personal thirst for vengeance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But did he? Even as he forgot and called his heart&rsquo;s desire, which was
+the life of the second mate, even then, without intention, mechanically, his
+sailor&rsquo;s considerative eye lifted to note the draw of the sails and roved
+from sail to sail. Thereupon, so reminded, he returned to his fidelity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he snarled at Bert Rhine. &ldquo;Go on and get
+for&rsquo;ard before I spit on you, you scum and slum. I&rsquo;ll give you and
+the rest of the rats two minutes to return to duty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the leader, with his two fellow-gangsters, laughed their weird, silent
+laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess you&rsquo;ll listen to our talk, first, old horse,&rdquo; Bert
+Rhine retorted. &ldquo;&mdash;Davis, get up now and show what kind of a spieler
+you are. Don&rsquo;t get cold feet. Spit it out to Foxy Grandpa an&rsquo; tell
+&rsquo;m what&rsquo;s doin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You damned sea-lawyer!&rdquo; Mr. Pike snarled as Davis opened his mouth
+to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine shrugged his shoulders, and half turned on his heel as if to depart,
+as he said quietly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well, if you don&rsquo;t want to talk . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike conceded a point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; he snarled. &ldquo;Spit the dirt out of your system,
+Davis; but remember one thing: you&rsquo;ll pay for this, and you&rsquo;ll pay
+through the nose. Go on!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sea-lawyer cleared his throat in preparation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;First of all, I ain&rsquo;t got no part in this,&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a sick man, an&rsquo; I oughta be in my bunk right now. I
+ain&rsquo;t fit to be on my feet. But they&rsquo;ve asked me to advise
+&rsquo;em on the law, an&rsquo; I have advised &rsquo;em&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the law&mdash;what is it?&rdquo; Mr. Pike broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Davis was uncowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The law is that when the officers is inefficient, the crew can take
+charge peaceably an&rsquo; bring the ship into port. It&rsquo;s all law
+an&rsquo; in the records. There was the <i>Abyssinia</i>, in eighteen
+ninety-two, when the master&rsquo;d died of fever and the mates took to
+drinkin&rsquo;&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go on!&rdquo; Mr. Pike shut him off. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want your
+citations. What d&rsquo;ye want? Spit it out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;and I&rsquo;m talkin&rsquo; as an outsider, as a sick man off
+duty that&rsquo;s been asked to talk&mdash;well, the point is our skipper was a
+good one, but he&rsquo;s gone. Our mate is violent, seekin&rsquo; the life of
+the second mate. We don&rsquo;t care about that. What we want is to get into
+port with our lives. An&rsquo; our lives is in danger. We ain&rsquo;t hurt
+nobody. You&rsquo;ve done all the bloodshed. You&rsquo;ve shot an&rsquo; killed
+an&rsquo; thrown two men overboard, as witnesses&rsquo;ll testify to in court.
+An&rsquo; there&rsquo;s Roberts, there, dead, too, an&rsquo; headin&rsquo; for
+the sharks&mdash;an&rsquo; what for? For defendin&rsquo; himself from murderous
+an&rsquo; deadly attack, as every man can testify an&rsquo; tell the truth, the
+whole truth, an&rsquo; nothin&rsquo; but the truth, so help &rsquo;m,
+God&mdash;ain&rsquo;t that right, men?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A confused murmur of assent arose from many of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You want my job, eh?&rdquo; Mr. Pike grinned. &ldquo;An&rsquo; what are
+you goin&rsquo; to do with me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be taken care of until we get in an&rsquo; turn you over to
+the lawful authorities,&rdquo; Davis answered promptly. &ldquo;Most likely you
+can plead insanity an&rsquo; get off easy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment I felt a stir at my shoulder. It was Margaret, armed with the
+long knife of the steward, whom she had put at the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got another guess comin&rsquo;, Davis,&rdquo; Mr. Pike
+said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got no more talk with you. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to
+talk to the bunch. I&rsquo;ll give you fellows just two minutes to choose, and
+I&rsquo;ll tell you your choices. You&rsquo;ve only got two choices.
+You&rsquo;ll turn the second mate over to me an&rsquo; go back to duty and take
+what&rsquo;s comin&rsquo; to you, or you&rsquo;ll go to jail with the stripes
+on you for long sentences. You&rsquo;ve got two minutes. The fellows that want
+jail can stand right where they are. The fellows that don&rsquo;t want jail and
+are willin&rsquo; to work faithful, can walk right back to me here on the poop.
+Two minutes, an&rsquo; you can keep your jaws stopped while you think over what
+it&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned his head to me and said in an undertone, &ldquo;Be ready with that
+pop-gun for trouble. An&rsquo; don&rsquo;t hesitate. Slap it into
+&rsquo;em&mdash;the swine that think they can put as raw a deal as this over on
+us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Buckwheat who made the first move; but so tentative was it that it got
+no farther than a tensing of the legs and a sway forward of the shoulders.
+Nevertheless it was sufficient to start Herman Lunkenheimer, who thrust out his
+foot and began confidently to walk aft. Kid Twist gained him in a single
+spring, and Kid Twist, his wrist under the German&rsquo;s throat from behind;
+his knee pressed into the German&rsquo;s back, bent the man backward and held
+him. Even as the rifle came to my shoulder, the hound Bombini drew his knife
+directly beneath Kid Twist&rsquo;s wrist across the up-stretched throat of the
+man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this instant that I heard Mr. Pike&rsquo;s &ldquo;Plug him!&rdquo;
+and pulled the trigger; and of all ungodly things the bullet missed and caught
+the Faun, who staggered back, sat down on the hatch, and began to cough. And
+even as he coughed he still strained with pain-eloquent eyes to try to
+understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No other man moved. Herman Lunkenheimer, released by Kid Twist, sank down on
+the deck. Nor did I shoot again. Kid Twist stood again by the side of Bert
+Rhine and Guido Bombini fawned near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine actually visibly smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any more of you guys want to promenade aft?&rdquo; he queried in velvet
+tones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two minutes up,&rdquo; Mr. Pike declared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; what are you goin&rsquo; to do about it, Grandpa?&rdquo; Bert
+Rhine sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a flash the big automatic was out of the mate&rsquo;s pocket and he was
+shooting as fast as he could pull trigger, while all hands fled to shelter.
+But, as he had long since told me, he was no shot and could effectively use the
+weapon only at close range&mdash;muzzle to stomach preferably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we stared at the main deck, deserted save for the dead cowboy on his back
+and for the Faun who still sat on the hatch and coughed, an eruption of men
+occurred over the for&rsquo;ard edge of the &rsquo;midship-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shoot!&rdquo; Margaret cried at my back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Mr. Pike roared at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rifle was at my shoulder when I desisted. Louis, the cook, led the rush aft
+to us across the top of the house and along the bridge. Behind him, in single
+file and not wasting any time, came the Japanese sail-makers, Henry the
+training-ship boy, and the other boy Buckwheat. Tom Spink brought up the rear.
+As he came up the ladder of the &rsquo;midship-house somebody from beneath must
+have caught him by a leg in an effort to drag him back. We saw half of him in
+sight and knew that he was struggling and kicking. He fetched clear abruptly,
+gained the top of the house in a surge, and raced aft along the bridge until he
+overtook and collided with Buckwheat, who yelled out in fear that a mutineer
+had caught him.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap43"></a>CHAPTER XLIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+We who are aft, besieged in the high place, are stronger in numbers than I
+dreamed until now, when I have just finished taking the ship&rsquo;s census. Of
+course Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself are apart. We alone represent the ruling
+class. With us are servants and serfs, faithful to their salt, who look to us
+for guidance and life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I use my words advisedly. Tom Spink and Buckwheat are serfs and nothing else.
+Henry, the training-ship boy, occupies an anomalous classification. He is of
+our kind, but he can scarcely be called even a cadet of our kind. He will some
+day win to us and become a mate or a captain, but in the meantime, of course,
+his past is against him. He is a candidate, rising from the serf class to our
+class. Also, he is only a youth, the iron of his heredity not yet tested and
+proven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wada, Louis, and the steward are servants of Asiatic breed. So are the two
+Japanese sail-makers&mdash;scarcely servants, not to be called slaves, but
+something in between.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, all told, there are eleven of us aft in the citadel. But our followers are
+too servant-like and serf-like to be offensive fighters. They will help us
+defend the high place against all attack; but they are incapable of joining
+with us in an attack on the other end of the ship. They will fight like
+cornered rats to preserve their lives; but they will not advance like tigers
+upon the enemy. Tom Spink is faithful but spirit-broken. Buckwheat is
+hopelessly of the stupid lowly. Henry has not yet won his spurs. On our side
+remain Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself. The rest will hold the wall of the poop
+and fight thereon to the death, but they are not to be depended upon in a
+sortie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the other end of the ship&mdash;and I may as well give the roster, are: the
+second mate, either to be called Mellaire or Waltham, a strong man of our own
+breed but a renegade; the three gangsters, killers and jackals, Bert Rhine,
+Nosey Murphy, and Kid Twist; the Maltese Cockney and Tony the crazy Greek;
+Frank Fitzgibbon and Richard Giller, the survivors of the trio of
+&ldquo;bricklayers&rdquo;; Anton Sorensen and Lars Jacobsen, stupid
+Scandinavian sailor-men; Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Berserk; John Hackey
+and Arthur Deacon, respectively hoodlum and white slaver; Shorty, the
+mixed-breed clown; Guido Bombini, the Italian hound; Andy Fay and Mulligan
+Jacobs, the bitter ones; the three topaz-eyed dreamers, who are unclassifiable;
+Isaac Chantz, the wounded Jew; Bob, the overgrown dolt; the feeble-minded Faun,
+lung-wounded; Nancy and Sundry Buyers, the two hopeless, helpless bosuns; and,
+finally, the sea-lawyer, Charles Davis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This makes twenty-seven of them against the eleven of us. But there are men,
+strong in viciousness, among them. They, too, have their serfs and bravos.
+Guido Bombini and Isaac Chantz are certainly bravos. And weaklings like
+Sorensen, and Jacobsen, and Bob, cannot be anything else than slaves to the men
+who compose the gangster clique.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I failed to tell what happened yesterday, after Mr. Pike emptied his automatic
+and cleared the deck. The poop was indubitably ours, and there was no
+possibility of the mutineers making a charge on us in broad daylight. Margaret
+had gone below, accompanied by Wada, to see to the security of the port and
+starboard doors that open from the cabin directly on the main deck. These are
+still caulked and tight and fastened on the inside, as they have been since the
+passage of Cape Horn began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike put one of the sail-makers at the wheel, and the steward, relieved and
+starting below, was attracted to the port quarter, where the patent log that
+towed astern was made fast. Margaret had returned his knife to him, and he was
+carrying it in his hand when his attention was attracted astern to our wake.
+Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley had managed to catch the lazily moving log-line
+and were clinging to it. The <i>Elsinore</i> was moving just fast enough to
+keep them on the surface instead of dragging them under. Above them and about
+them circled curious and hungry albatrosses, Cape hens, and mollyhawks. Even as
+I glimpsed the situation one of the big birds, a ten-footer at least, with a
+ten-inch beak to the fore, dropped down on the Italian. Releasing his hold with
+one hand, he struck with his knife at the bird. Feathers flew, and the
+albatross, deflected by the blow, fell clumsily into the water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite methodically, just as part of the day&rsquo;s work, the steward chopped
+down with his knife, catching the log-line between the steel edge and the rail.
+At once, no longer buoyed up by the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> two-knot drag
+ahead, the wounded men began to swim and flounder. The circling hosts of huge
+sea-birds descended upon them, with carnivorous beaks striking at their heads
+and shoulders and arms. A great screeching and squawking arose from the winged
+things of prey as they strove for the living meat. And yet, somehow, I was not
+very profoundly shocked. These were the men whom I had seen eviscerate the
+shark and toss it overboard, and shout with joy as they watched it devoured
+alive by its brethren. They had played a violent, cruel game with the things of
+life, and the things of life now played upon them the same violent, cruel game.
+As they that rise by the sword perish by the sword, just so did these two men
+who had lived cruelly die cruelly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s comment, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ve saved
+two sacks of mighty good coal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly our situation might be worse. We are cooking on the coal-stove and on
+the oil-burners. We have servants to cook and serve for us. And, most important
+of all, we are in possession of all the food on the <i>Elsinore</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike makes no mistake. Realizing that with our crowd we cannot rush the
+crowd at the other end of the ship, he accepts the siege, which, as he says,
+consists of the besieged holding all food supplies while the besiegers are on
+the imminent edge of famine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Starve the dogs,&rdquo; he growls. &ldquo;Starve &rsquo;m until they
+crawl aft and lick our shoes. Maybe you think the custom of carrying the stores
+aft just happened. Only it didn&rsquo;t. Before you and I were born it was
+long-established and it was established on brass tacks. They knew what they
+were about, the old cusses, when they put the grub in the lazarette.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis says there is not more than three days&rsquo; regular whack in the
+galley; that the barrel of hard-tack in the forecastle will quickly go; and
+that our chickens, which they stole last night from the top of the
+&rsquo;midship-house, are equivalent to no more than an additional day&rsquo;s
+supply. In short, at the outside limit, we are convinced the men will be keen
+to talk surrender within the week.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are no longer sailing. In last night&rsquo;s darkness we helplessly listened
+to the men loosing headsail-halyards and letting yards go down on the run.
+Under orders of Mr. Pike I shot blindly and many times into the dark, but
+without result, save that we heard the bullets of answering shots strike
+against the chart-house. So to-day we have not even a man at the wheel. The
+<i>Elsinore</i> drifts idly on an idle sea, and we stand regular watches in the
+shelter of chart-house and jiggermast. Mr. Pike says it is the laziest time he
+has had on the whole voyage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I alternate watches with him, although when on duty there is little to be done,
+save, in the daytime, to stand rifle in hand behind the jiggermast, and, in the
+night, to lurk along the break of the poop. Behind the chart-house, ready to
+repel assault, are my watch of four men: Tom Spink, Wada, Buckwheat, and Louis.
+Henry, the two Japanese sail-makers, and the old steward compose Mr.
+Pike&rsquo;s watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is his orders that no one for&rsquo;ard is to be allowed to show himself,
+so, to-day, when the second mate appeared at the corner of the
+&rsquo;midship-house, I made him take a quick leap back with the thud of my
+bullet against the iron wall a foot from his head. Charles Davis tried the same
+game and was similarly stimulated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Also, this evening, after dark, Mr. Pike put block-and-tackle on the first
+section of the bridge, heaved it out of place, and lowered it upon the poop.
+Likewise he hoisted in the ladder at the break of the poop that leads down to
+the main deck. The men will have to do some climbing if they ever elect to rush
+us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am writing this in my watch below. I came off duty at eight o&rsquo;clock,
+and at midnight I go on deck to stay till four to-morrow morning. Wada shakes
+his head and says that the Blackwood Company should rebate us on the
+first-class passage paid in advance. We are working our passage, he contends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret takes the adventure joyously. It is the first time she has experienced
+mutiny, but she is such a thorough sea-woman that she appears like an old hand
+at the game. She leaves the deck to the mate and me; but, still acknowledging
+his leadership, she has taken charge below and entirely manages the commissary,
+the cooking, and the sleeping arrangements. We still keep our old quarters, and
+she has bedded the new-comers in the big after-room with blankets issued from
+the slop-chest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a way, from the standpoint of her personal welfare, the mutiny is the best
+thing that could have happened to her. It has taken her mind off her father and
+filled her waking hours with work to do. This afternoon, standing above the
+open booby-hatch, I heard her laugh ring out as in the old days coming down the
+Atlantic. Yes, and she hums snatches of songs under her breath as she works. In
+the second dog-watch this evening, after Mr. Pike had finished dinner and
+joined us on the poop, she told him that if he did not soon re-rig his
+phonograph she was going to start in on the piano. The reason she advanced was
+the psychological effect such sounds of revelry would have on the starving
+mutineers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days pass, and nothing of moment happens. We get nowhere. The
+<i>Elsinore</i>, without the steadying of her canvas, rolls emptily and drifts
+a lunatic course. Sometimes she is bow on to the wind, and at other times she
+is directly before it; but at all times she is circling vaguely and hesitantly
+to get somewhere else than where she is. As an illustration, at daylight this
+morning she came up into the wind as if endeavouring to go about. In the course
+of half an hour she worked off till the wind was directly abeam. In another
+half hour she was back into the wind. Not until evening did she manage to get
+the wind on her port bow; but when she did, she immediately paid off,
+accomplished the complete circle in an hour, and recommenced her morning
+tactics of trying to get into the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there is nothing for us to do save hold the poop against the attack that is
+never made. Mr. Pike, more from force of habit than anything else, takes his
+regular observations and works up the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> position. This
+noon she was eight miles east of yesterday&rsquo;s position, yet to-day&rsquo;s
+position, in longitude, was within a mile of where she was four days ago. On
+the other hand she invariably makes northing at the rate of seven or eight
+miles a day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aloft, the <i>Elsinore</i> is a sad spectacle. All is confusion and disorder.
+The sails, unfurled, are a slovenly mess along the yards, and many loose ends
+sway dismally to every roll. The only yard that is loose is the main-yard. It
+is fortunate that wind and wave are mild, else would the iron-work carry away
+and the mutineers find the huge thing of steel about their ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is one thing we cannot understand. A week has passed, and the men show no
+signs of being starved into submission. Repeatedly and in vain has Mr. Pike
+interrogated the hands aft with us. One and all, from the cook to Buckwheat,
+they swear they have no knowledge of any food for&rsquo;ard, save the small
+supply in the galley and the barrel of hardtack in the forecastle. Yet it is
+very evident that those for&rsquo;ard are not starving. We see the smoke from
+the galley-stove and can only conclude that they have food to cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twice has Bert Rhine attempted a truce, but both times his white flag, as soon
+as it showed above the edge of the &rsquo;midship-house, was fired upon by Mr.
+Pike. The last occurrence was two days ago. It is Mr. Pike&rsquo;s intention
+thoroughly to starve them into submission, but now he is beginning to worry
+about their mysterious food supply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike is not quite himself. He is obsessed, I know beyond any doubt, with
+the idea of vengeance on the second mate. On divers occasions, now, I have come
+unexpectedly upon him and found him muttering to himself with grim set face, or
+clenching and unclenching his big square fists and grinding his teeth. His
+conversation continually runs upon the feasibility of our making a night attack
+for&rsquo;ard, and he is perpetually questioning Tom Spink and Louis on their
+ideas of where the various men may be sleeping&mdash;the point of which always
+is: <i>Where is the second mate likely to be sleeping</i>?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No later than yesterday afternoon did he give me most positive proof of his
+obsession. It was four o&rsquo;clock, the beginning of the first dog-watch, and
+he had just relieved me. So careless have we grown, that we now stand in broad
+daylight at the exposed break of the poop. Nobody shoots at us, and,
+occasionally, over the top of the for&rsquo;ard-house, Shorty sticks up his
+head and grins or makes clownish faces at us. At such times Mr. Pike studies
+Shorty&rsquo;s features through the telescope in an effort to find signs of
+starvation. Yet he admits dolefully that Shorty is looking fleshed-up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to return. Mr. Pike had just relieved me yesterday afternoon, when the
+second mate climbed the forecastle-head and sauntered to the very eyes of the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, where he stood gazing overside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take a crack at &rsquo;m,&rdquo; Mr. Pike said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a long shot, and I was taking slow and careful aim, when he touched my
+arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I lowered the little rifle and looked at him inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You might hit him,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;And I want him for
+myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life is never what we expect it to be. All our voyage from Baltimore south to
+the Horn and around the Horn has been marked by violence and death. And now
+that it has culminated in open mutiny there is no more violence, much less
+death. We keep to ourselves aft, and the mutineers keep to themselves
+for&rsquo;ard. There is no more harshness, no more snarling and bellowing of
+commands; and in this fine weather a general festival obtains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aft, Mr. Pike and Margaret alternate with phonograph and piano; and
+for&rsquo;ard, although we cannot see them, a full-fledged
+&ldquo;foo-foo&rdquo; band makes most of the day and night hideous. A squealing
+accordion that Tom Spink says was the property of Mike Cipriani is played by
+Guido Bombini, who sets the pace and seems the leader of the foo-foo. There are
+two broken-reeded harmonicas. Someone plays a jew&rsquo;s-harp. Then there are
+home-made fifes and whistles and drums, combs covered with paper, extemporized
+triangles, and bones made from ribs of salt horse such as negro minstrels use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole crew seems to compose the band, and, like a lot of monkey-folk
+rejoicing in rude rhythm, emphasizes the beat by hammering kerosene cans,
+frying-pans, and all sorts of things metallic or reverberant. Some genius has
+rigged a line to the clapper of the ship&rsquo;s bell on the forecastle-head
+and clangs it horribly in the big foo-foo crises, though Bombini can be heard
+censuring him severely on occasion. And to cap it all, the fog-horn machine
+pumps in at the oddest moments in imitation of a big bass viol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this is mutiny on the high seas! Almost every hour of my deck-watches I
+listen to this infernal din, and am maddened into desire to join with Mr. Pike
+in a night attack and put these rebellious and inharmonious slaves to work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet they are not entirely inharmonious. Guido Bombini has a respectable though
+untrained tenor voice, and has surprised me by a variety of selections, not
+only from Verdi, but from Wagner and Massenet. Bert Rhine and his crowd are
+full of rag-time junk, and one phrase that has caught the fancy of all hands,
+and which they roar out at all times, is: &ldquo;<i>It&rsquo;s a bear</i>!
+<i>It&rsquo;s a bear</i>! <i>It&rsquo;s a bear</i>!&rdquo; This morning Nancy,
+evidently very strongly urged, gave a doleful rendering of <i>Flying Cloud</i>.
+Yes, and in the second dog-watch last evening our three topaz-eyed dreamers
+sang some folk-song strangely sweet and sad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this is mutiny! As I write I can scarcely believe it. Yet I know Mr. Pike
+keeps the watch over my head. I hear the shrill laughter of the steward and
+Louis over some ancient Chinese joke. Wada and the sail-makers, in the pantry,
+are, I know, talking Japanese politics. And from across the cabin, along the
+narrow halls, I can hear Margaret softly humming as she goes to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all doubts vanish at the stroke of eight bells, when I go on deck to
+relieve Mr. Pike, who lingers a moment for a &ldquo;gam,&rdquo; as he calls
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say,&rdquo; he said confidentially, &ldquo;you and I can clean out the
+whole gang. All we got to do is sneak for&rsquo;ard and turn loose. As soon as
+we begin to shoot up, half of &rsquo;em&rsquo;ll bolt aft&mdash;lobsters like
+Nancy, an&rsquo; Sundry Buyers, an&rsquo; Jacobsen, an&rsquo; Bob, an&rsquo;
+Shorty, an&rsquo; them three castaways, for instance. An&rsquo; while
+they&rsquo;re doin&rsquo; that, an&rsquo; our bunch on the poop is takin&rsquo;
+&rsquo;em in, you an&rsquo; me can make a pretty big hole in them that&rsquo;s
+left. What d&rsquo;ye say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hesitated, thinking of Margaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, say,&rdquo; he urged, &ldquo;once I jumped into that
+fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;le, at close range, I&rsquo;d start right in,
+blim-blam-blim, fast as you could wink, nailing them gangsters, an&rsquo;
+Bombini, an&rsquo; the Sheeny, an&rsquo; Deacon, an&rsquo; the Cockney,
+an&rsquo; Mulligan Jacobs, an&rsquo; . . . an&rsquo; . . . Waltham.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That would be nine,&rdquo; I smiled. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve only eight
+shots in your Colt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike considered a moment, and revised his list. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he
+agreed, &ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll have to let Jacobs go. What d&rsquo;ye say?
+Are you game?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still I hesitated, but before I could speak he anticipated me and returned to
+his fidelity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, you can&rsquo;t do it, Mr. Pathurst. If by any luck they got the
+both of us . . . No; we&rsquo;ll just stay aft and sit tight until
+they&rsquo;re starved to it . . . But where they get their tucker gets me.
+For&rsquo;ard she&rsquo;s as bare as a bone, as any decent ship ought to be,
+and yet look at &rsquo;em, rolling hog fat. And by rights they ought to a-quit
+eatin&rsquo; a week ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap44"></a>CHAPTER XLIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Yes, it is certainly mutiny. Collecting water from the leaders of the
+chart-house in a shower of rain this morning, Buckwheat exposed himself, and a
+long, lucky revolver-shot from for&rsquo;ard caught him in the shoulder. The
+bullet was small-calibre and spent ere it reached him, so that he received no
+more than a flesh-wound, though he carried on as if he were dying until Mr.
+Pike hushed his noise by cuffing his ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I should not like to have Mr. Pike for my surgeon. He probed for the bullet
+with his little finger, which was far too big for the aperture; and with his
+little finger, while with his other hand he threatened another ear-clout, he
+gouged out the leaden pellet. Then he sent the boy below, where Margaret took
+him in charge with antiseptics and dressings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I see her so rarely that a half-hour alone with her these days is an adventure.
+She is busy morning to night in keeping her house in order. As I write this,
+through my open door I can hear her laying the law down to the men in the
+after-room. She has issued underclothes all around from the slop-chest, and is
+ordering them to take a bath in the rain-water just caught. And to make sure of
+their thoroughness in the matter, she has told off Louis and the steward to
+supervise the operation. Also, she has forbidden them smoking their pipes in
+the after-room. And, to cap everything, they are to scrub walls, ceiling,
+everything, and then start to-morrow morning at painting. All of which serves
+to convince me almost that mutiny does not obtain and that I have imagined it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no. I hear Buckwheat blubbering and demanding how he can take a bath in his
+wounded condition. I wait and listen for Margaret&rsquo;s judgment. Nor am I
+disappointed. Tom Spink and Henry are told off to the task, and the thorough
+scrubbing of Buckwheat is assured.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mutineers are not starving. To-day they have been fishing for albatrosses.
+A few minutes after they caught the first one its carcase was flung overboard.
+Mr. Pike studied it through his sea-glasses, and I heard him grit his teeth
+when he made certain that it was not the mere feathers and skin but the entire
+carcass. They had taken only its wing-bones to make into pipe-stems. The
+inference was obvious: <i>starving men would not throw meat away in such
+fashion</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But where do they get their food? It is a sea-mystery in itself, although I
+might not so deem it were it not for Mr. Pike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think, and think, till my brain is all frazzled out,&rdquo; he tells
+me; &ldquo;and yet I can&rsquo;t get a line on it. I know every inch of space
+on the <i>Elsinore</i>, and know there isn&rsquo;t an ounce of grub anywhere
+for&rsquo;ard, and yet they eat! I&rsquo;ve overhauled the lazarette. As near
+as I can make it out, nothing is missing. Then where do they get it?
+That&rsquo;s what I want to know. Where do they get it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I know that this morning he spent hours in the lazarette with the steward and
+the cook, overhauling and checking off from the lists of the Baltimore agents.
+And I know that they came up out of the lazarette, the three of them, dripping
+with perspiration and baffled. The steward has raised the hypothesis that,
+first of all, there were extra stores left over from the previous voyage, or
+from previous voyages, and, next, that the stealing of these stores must have
+taken place during the night-watches when it was Mr. Pike&rsquo;s turn below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any rate, the mate takes the food mystery almost as much to heart as he
+takes the persistent and propinquitous existence of Sidney Waltham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am coming to realize the meaning of watch-and-watch. To begin with, I spend
+on deck twelve hours, and a fraction more, of each twenty-four. A fair portion
+of the remaining twelve is spent in eating, in dressing, and in undressing, and
+with Margaret. As a result, I feel the need for more sleep than I am getting. I
+scarcely read at all, now. The moment my head touches the pillow I am asleep.
+Oh, I sleep like a baby, eat like a navvy, and in years have not enjoyed such
+physical well-being. I tried to read George Moore last night, and was
+dreadfully bored. He may be a realist, but I solemnly aver he does not know
+reality on that tight, little, sheltered-life archipelago of his. If he could
+wind-jam around the Horn just one voyage he would be twice the writer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Mr. Pike, for practically all of his sixty-nine years, has stood his
+watch-and-watch, with many a spill-over of watches into watches. And yet he is
+iron. In a struggle with him I am confident that he would break me like so much
+straw. He is truly a prodigy of a man, and, so far as to-day is concerned, an
+anachronism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Faun is not dead, despite my unlucky bullet. Henry insisted that he caught
+a glimpse of him yesterday. To-day I saw him myself. He came to the corner of
+the &rsquo;midship-house and gazed wistfully aft at the poop, straining and
+eager to understand. In the same way I have often seen Possum gaze at me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has just struck me that of our eight followers five are Asiatic and only
+three are our own breed. Somehow it reminds me of India and of Clive and
+Hastings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the fine weather continues, and we wonder how long a time must elapse ere
+our mutineers eat up their mysterious food and are starved back to work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are almost due west of Valparaiso and quite a bit less than a thousand miles
+off the west coast of South America. The light northerly breezes, varying from
+north-east to west, would, according to Mr. Pike, work us in nicely for
+Valparaiso if only we had sail on the <i>Elsinore</i>. As it is, sailless, she
+drifts around and about and makes nowhere save for the slight northerly drift
+each day.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Pike is beside himself. In the past two days he has displayed increasing
+possession of himself by the one idea of vengeance on the second mate. It is
+not the mutiny, irksome as it is and helpless as it makes him; it is the
+presence of the murderer of his old-time and admired skipper, Captain Somers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mate grins at the mutiny, calls it a snap, speaks gleefully of how his
+wages are running up, and regrets that he is not ashore, where he would be able
+to take a hand in gambling on the reinsurance. But the sight of Sidney Waltham,
+calmly gazing at sea and sky from the forecastle-head, or astride the far end
+of the bowsprit and fishing for sharks, maddens him. Yesterday, coming to
+relieve me, he borrowed my rifle and turned loose the stream of tiny pellets on
+the second mate, who coolly made his line secure ere he scrambled in-board. Of
+course, it was only one chance in a hundred that Mr. Pike might have hit him,
+but Sidney Waltham did not care to encourage the chance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet it is not like mutiny&mdash;not like the conventional mutiny I absorbed
+as a boy, and which has become classic in the literature of the sea. There is
+no hand-to-hand fighting, no crash of cannon and flash of cutlass, no sailors
+drinking grog, no lighted matches held over open powder-magazines.
+Heavens!&mdash;there isn&rsquo;t a single cutlass nor a powder-magazine on
+board. And as for grog, not a man has had a drink since Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, it is mutiny after all. I shall never doubt it again. It may be
+nineteen-thirteen mutiny on a coal-carrier, with feeblings and imbeciles and
+criminals for mutineers; but at any rate mutiny it is, and at least in the
+number of deaths it is reminiscent of the old days. For things have happened
+since last I had opportunity to write up this log. For that matter, I am now
+the keeper of the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> official log as well, in which work
+Margaret helps me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I might have known it would happen. At four yesterday morning I relieved
+Mr. Pike. When in the darkness I came up to him at the break of the poop, I had
+to speak to him twice to make him aware of my presence. And then he merely
+grunted acknowledgment in an absent sort of way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment he brightened up, and was himself save that he was too bright.
+He was making an effort. I felt this, but was quite unprepared for what
+followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be back in a minute,&rdquo; he said, as he put his leg over
+the rail and lightly and swiftly lowered himself down into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was nothing I could do. To cry out or to attempt to reason with him would
+only have drawn the mutineers&rsquo; attention. I heard his feet strike the
+deck beneath as he let go. Immediately he started for&rsquo;ard. Little enough
+precaution he took. I swear that clear to the &rsquo;midship-house I heard the
+dragging age-lag of his feet. Then that ceased, and that was all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I repeat. That was all. Never a sound came from for&rsquo;ard. I held my watch
+till daylight. I held it till Margaret came on deck with her cheery &ldquo;What
+ho of the night, brave mariner?&rdquo; I held the next watch (which should have
+been the mate&rsquo;s) till midday, eating both breakfast and lunch behind the
+sheltering jiggermast. And I held all afternoon, and through both dog-watches,
+my dinner served likewise on the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that was all. Nothing happened. The galley-stove smoked three times,
+advertising the cooking of three meals. Shorty made faces at me as usual across
+the rim of the for&rsquo;ard-house. The Maltese Cockney caught an albatross.
+There was some excitement when Tony the Greek hooked a shark off the jib-boom,
+so big that half a dozen tailed on to the line and failed to land it. But I
+caught no glimpse of Mr. Pike nor of the renegade Sidney Waltham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, it was a lazy, quiet day of sunshine and gentle breeze. There was no
+inkling to what had happened to the mate. Was he a prisoner? Was he already
+overside? Why were there no shots? He had his big automatic. It is
+inconceivable that he did not use it at least once. Margaret and I discussed
+the affair till we were well a-weary, but reached no conclusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She is a true daughter of the race. At the end of the second dog-watch, armed
+with her father&rsquo;s revolver, she insisted on standing the first watch of
+the night. I compromised with the inevitable by having Wada make up my bed on
+the deck in the shelter of the cabin skylight just for&rsquo;ard of the
+jiggermast. Henry, the two sail-makers and the steward, variously equipped with
+knives and clubs, were stationed along the break of the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And right here I wish to pass my first criticism on modern mutiny. On ships
+like the <i>Elsinore</i> there are not enough weapons to go around. The only
+firearms now aft are Captain West&rsquo;s .38 Colt revolver, and my .22
+automatic Winchester. The old steward, with a penchant for hacking and
+chopping, has his long knife and a butcher&rsquo;s cleaver. Henry, in addition
+to his sheath-knife, has a short bar of iron. Louis, despite a most sanguinary
+array of butcher-knives and a big poker, pins his cook&rsquo;s faith on hot
+water and sees to it that two kettles are always piping on top the cabin stove.
+Buckwheat, who on account of his wound is getting all night in for a couple of
+nights, cherishes a hatchet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest of our retainers have knives and clubs, although Yatsuda, the first
+sail-maker, carries a hand-axe, and Uchino, the second sail-maker, sleeping or
+waking, never parts from a claw-hammer. Tom Spink has a harpoon. Wada, however,
+is the genius. By means of the cabin stove he has made a sharp pike-point of
+iron and fitted it to a pole. To-morrow be intends to make more for the other
+men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is rather shuddery, however, to speculate on the terrible assortment of
+cutting, gouging, jabbing and slashing weapons with which the mutineers are
+able to equip themselves from the carpenter&rsquo;s shop. If it ever comes to
+an assault on the poop there will be a weird mess of wounds for the survivors
+to dress. For that matter, master as I am of my little rifle, no man could gain
+the poop in the day-time. Of course, if rush they will, they will rush us in
+the night, when my rifle will be worthless. Then it will be blow for blow,
+hand-to-hand, and the strongest pates and arms will win.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no. I have just bethought me. We shall be ready for any night-rush.
+I&rsquo;ll take a leaf out of modern warfare, and show them not only that we
+are top-dog (a favourite phrase of the mate), but <i>why</i> we are top-dog. It
+is simple&mdash;night illumination. As I write I work out the
+idea&mdash;gasoline, balls of oakum, caps and gunpowder from a few cartridges,
+Roman candles, and flares blue, red, and green, shallow metal receptacles to
+carry the explosive and inflammable stuff; and a trigger-like arrangement by
+which, pulling on a string, the caps are exploded in the gunpowder and fire set
+to the gasoline-soaked oakum and to the flares and candles. It will be brain as
+well as brawn against mere brawn.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have worked like a Trojan all day, and the idea is realized. Margaret helped
+me out with suggestions, and Tom Spink did the sailorizing. Over our head, from
+the jiggermast, the steel stays that carry the three jigger-trysails descend
+high above the break of the poop and across the main deck to the mizzenmast. A
+light line has been thrown over each stay, and been thrown repeatedly around so
+as to form an unslipping knot. Tom Spink waited till dark, when he went aloft
+and attached loose rings of stiff wire around the stays below the knots. Also
+he bent on hoisting-gear and connected permanent fastenings with the sliding
+rings. And further, between rings and fastenings, is a slack of fifty feet of
+light line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the idea: after dark each night we shall hoist our three metal
+wash-basins, loaded with inflammables, up to the stays. The arrangement is such
+that at the first alarm of a rush, by pulling a cord the trigger is pulled that
+ignites the powder, and the very same pull operates a trip-device that lets the
+rings slide down the steel stays. Of course, suspended from the rings, are the
+illuminators, and when they have run down the stays fifty feet the lines will
+automatically bring them to rest. Then all the main deck between the poop and
+the mizzen-mast will be flooded with light, while we shall be in comparative
+darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course each morning before daylight we shall lower all this apparatus to the
+deck, so that the men for&rsquo;ard will not guess what we have up our sleeve,
+or, rather, what we have up on the trysail-stays. Even to-day the little of our
+gear that has to be left standing aroused their curiosity. Head after head
+showed over the edge of the for&rsquo;ard-house as they peeped and peered and
+tried to make out what we were up to. Why, I find myself almost looking forward
+to an attack in order to see the device work.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap45"></a>CHAPTER XLV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+And what has happened to Mr. Pike remains a mystery. For that matter, what has
+happened to the second mate? In the past three days we have by our eyes taken
+the census of the mutineers. Every man has been seen by us with the sole
+exception of Mr. Mellaire, or Sidney Waltham, as I assume I must correctly name
+him. He has not appeared&mdash;does not appear; and we can only speculate and
+conjecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the past three days various interesting things have taken place. Margaret
+stands watch and watch with me, day and night, the clock around; for there is
+no one of our retainers to whom we can entrust the responsibility of a watch.
+Though mutiny obtains and we are besieged in the high place, the weather is so
+mild and there is so little call on our men that they have grown careless and
+sleep aft of the chart-house when it is their watch on deck. Nothing ever
+happens, and, like true sailors, they wax fat and lazy. Even have I found
+Louis, the steward, and Wada guilty of cat-napping. In fact, the training-ship
+boy, Henry, is the only one who has never lapsed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, yes, and I gave Tom Spink a thrashing yesterday. Since the disappearance of
+the mate he had had little faith in me, and had been showing vague signs of
+insolence and insubordination. Both Margaret and I had noted it independently.
+Day before yesterday we talked it over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a good sailor, but weak,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If we let him go
+on, he will infect the rest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very well, I&rsquo;ll take him in hand,&rdquo; I announced valorously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will have to,&rdquo; she encouraged. &ldquo;Be hard. Be hard. You
+must be hard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those who sit in the high places must be hard, yet have I discovered that it is
+hard to be hard. For instance, easy enough was it to drop Steve Roberts as he
+was in the act of shooting at me. Yet it is most difficult to be hard with a
+chuckle-headed retainer like Tom Spink&mdash;especially when he continually
+fails by a shade to give sufficient provocation. For twenty-four hours after my
+talk with Margaret I was on pins and needles to have it out with him, yet
+rather than have had it out with him I should have preferred to see the poop
+rushed by the gang from the other side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not in a day can the tyro learn to employ the snarling immediacy of mastery of
+Mr. Pike, nor the reposeful, voiceless mastery of a Captain West. Truly, the
+situation was embarrassing. I was not trained in the handling of men, and Tom
+Spink knew it in his chuckle-headed way. Also, in his chuckle-headed way, he
+was dispirited by the loss of the mate. Fearing the mate, nevertheless he had
+depended on the mate to fetch him through with a whole skin, or at least alive.
+On me he has no dependence. What chance had the gentleman passenger and the
+captain&rsquo;s daughter against the gang for&rsquo;ard? So he must have
+reasoned, and, so reasoning, become despairing and desperate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After Margaret had told me to be hard I watched Tom Spink with an eagle eye,
+and he must have sensed my attitude, for he carefully forebore from
+overstepping, while all the time he palpitated just on the edge of
+overstepping. Yes, and it was clear that Buckwheat was watching to learn the
+outcome of this veiled refractoriness. For that matter, the situation was not
+being missed by our keen-eyed Asiatics, and I know that I caught Louis several
+times verging on the offence of offering me advice. But he knew his place and
+managed to keep his tongue between his teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, yesterday, while I held the watch, Tom Spink was guilty of spitting
+tobacco juice on the deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now it must be understood that such an act is as grave an offence of the sea as
+blasphemy is of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Margaret who came to where I was stationed by the jiggermast and told me
+what had occurred; and it was she who took my rifle and relieved me so that I
+could go aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was the offensive spot, and there was Tom Spink, his cheek bulging with a
+quid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, you, get a swab and mop that up,&rdquo; I commanded in my harshest
+manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Spink merely rolled his quid with his tongue and regarded me with sneering
+thoughtfulness. I am sure he was no more surprised than was I by the
+immediateness of what followed. My fist went out like an arrow from a released
+bow, and Tom Spink staggered back, tripped against the corner of the
+tarpaulin-covered sounding-machine, and sprawled on the deck. He tried to make
+a fight of it, but I followed him up, giving him no chance to set himself or
+recover from the surprise of my first onslaught.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now it so happens that not since I was a boy have I struck a person with my
+naked fist, and I candidly admit that I enjoyed the trouncing I administered to
+poor Tom Spink. Yes, and in the rapid play about the deck I caught a glimpse of
+Margaret. She had stepped out of the shelter of the mast and was looking on
+from the corner of the chart-house. Yes, and more; she was looking on with a
+cool, measuring eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, it was all very grotesque, to be sure. But then, mutiny on the high seas in
+the year nineteen-thirteen is also grotesque. No lists here between mailed
+knights for a lady&rsquo;s favour, but merely the trouncing of a chuckle-head
+for spitting on the deck of a coal-carrier. Nevertheless, the fact that my lady
+looked on added zest to my enterprise, and, doubtlessly, speed and weight to my
+blows, and at least half a dozen additional clouts to the unlucky sailor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, man is strangely and wonderfully made. Now that I coolly consider the
+matter, I realize that it was essentially the same spirit with which I enjoyed
+beating up Tom Spink, that I have in the past enjoyed contests of the mind in
+which I have out-epigrammed clever opponents. In the one case, one proves
+himself top-dog of the mind; in the other, top-dog of the muscle. Whistler and
+Wilde were just as much intellectual bullies as I was a physical bully
+yesterday morning when I punched Tom Spink into lying down and staying down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And my knuckles are sore and swollen. I cease writing for a moment to look at
+them and to hope that they will not stay permanently enlarged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At any rate, Tom Spink took his disciplining and promised to come in and be
+good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir!&rdquo; I thundered at him, quite in Mr. Pike&rsquo;s most
+bloodthirsty manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; he mumbled with bleeding lips. &ldquo;Yes, sir, I&rsquo;ll
+mop it up, sir. Yes, sir.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could scarcely keep from laughing in his face, the whole thing was so
+ludicrous; but I managed to look my haughtiest, and sternest, and fiercest,
+while I superintended the deck-cleansing. The funniest thing about the affair
+was that I must have knocked Tom Spink&rsquo;s quid down his throat, for he was
+gagging and hiccoughing all the time he mopped and scrubbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The atmosphere aft has been wonderfully clear ever since. Tom Spink obeys all
+orders on the jump, and Buckwheat jumps with equal celerity. As for the five
+Asiatics, I feel that they are stouter behind me now that I have shown
+masterfulness. By punching a man&rsquo;s face I verily believe I have doubled
+our united strength. And there is no need to punch any of the rest. The
+Asiatics are keen and willing. Henry is a true cadet of the breed, Buckwheat
+will follow Tom Spink&rsquo;s lead, and Tom Spink, a proper Anglo-Saxon
+peasant, will lead Buckwheat all the better by virtue of the punching.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two days have passed, and two noteworthy things have happened. The men seem to
+be nearing the end of their mysterious food supply, and we have had our first
+truce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have noted, through the glasses, that no more carcasses of the mollyhawks
+they are now catching are thrown overboard. This means that they have begun to
+eat the tough and unsavoury creatures, although it does not mean, of course,
+that they have entirely exhausted their other stores.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Margaret, her sailor&rsquo;s eye on the falling barometer and on the
+&ldquo;making&rdquo; stuff adrift in the sky, who called my attention to a
+coming blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As soon as the sea rises,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll have that
+loose main-yard and all the rest of the top-hamper tumbling down on
+deck.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was that I raised the white flag for a parley. Bert Rhine and Charles
+Davis came abaft the &rsquo;midship-house, and, while we talked, many faces
+peered over the for&rsquo;ard edge of the house and many forms slouched into
+view on the deck on each side of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, getting tired?&rdquo; was Bert Rhine&rsquo;s insolent greeting.
+&ldquo;Anything we can do for you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, there is,&rdquo; I answered sharply. &ldquo;You can save your heads
+so that when you return to work there will be enough of you left to do the
+work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you are making threats&mdash;&rdquo; Charles Davis began, but was
+silenced by a glare from the gangster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what is it?&rdquo; Bert Rhine demanded. &ldquo;Cough it off your
+chest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s for your own good,&rdquo; was my reply. &ldquo;It is coming
+on to blow, and all that unfurled canvas aloft will bring the yards down on
+your heads. We&rsquo;re safe here, aft. You are the ones who will run risks,
+and it is up to you to hustle your crowd aloft and make things fast and
+ship-shape.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if we don&rsquo;t?&rdquo; the gangster sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, you&rsquo;ll take your chances, that is all,&rdquo; I answered
+carelessly. &ldquo;I just want to call your attention to the fact that one of
+those steel yards, end-on, will go through the roof of your forecastle as if it
+were so much eggshell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine looked to Charles Davis for verification, and the latter nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll talk it over first,&rdquo; the gangster announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll give you ten minutes,&rdquo; I returned. &ldquo;If at the
+end of ten minutes you&rsquo;ve not started taking in, it will be too late. I
+shall put a bullet into any man who shows himself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, we&rsquo;ll talk it over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they started to go back, I called:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They stopped and turned about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What have you done to Mr. Pike?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even the impassive Bert Rhine could not quite conceal his surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; what have you done with Mr. Mellaire!&rdquo; he retorted.
+&ldquo;You tell us, an&rsquo; we&rsquo;ll tell you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am confident of the genuineness of his surprise. Evidently the mutineers have
+been believing us guilty of the disappearance of the second mate, just as we
+have been believing them guilty of the disappearance of the first mate. The
+more I dwell upon it the more it seems the proposition of the Kilkenny cats, a
+case of mutual destruction on the part of the two mates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Another thing,&rdquo; I said quickly. &ldquo;Where do you get your
+food?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine laughed one of his silent laughs; Charles Davis assumed an
+expression of mysteriousness and superiority; and Shorty, leaping into view
+from the corner of the house, danced a jig of triumph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I drew out my watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve ten minutes in which to
+make a start.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They turned and went for&rsquo;ard, and, before the ten minutes were up, all
+hands were aloft and stowing canvas. All this time the wind, out of the
+north-west, was breezing up. The old familiar harp-chords of a rising gale were
+strumming along the rigging, and the men, I verily believe from lack of
+practice, were particularly slow at their work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would be better if the upper-and-lower top-sails are set so that we
+can heave to,&rdquo; Margaret suggested. &ldquo;They will steady her and make
+it more comfortable for us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I seized the idea and improved upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better set the upper and lower topsails so that we can handle the
+ship,&rdquo; I called to the gangster, who was ordering the men about, quite
+like a mate, from the top of the &rsquo;midship-house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He considered the idea, and then gave the proper orders, although it was the
+Maltese Cockney, with Nancy and Sundry Buyers under him, who carried the orders
+out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I ordered Tom Spink to the long-idle wheel, and gave him the course, which was
+due east by the steering compass. This put the wind on our port quarter, so
+that the <i>Elsinore</i> began to move through the water before a fair breeze.
+And due east, less than a thousand miles away, lay the coast of South America
+and the port of Valparaiso.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange to say, none of our mutineers objected to this, and after dark, as we
+tore along before a full-sized gale, I sent my own men up on top the
+chart-house to take the gaskets off the spanker. This was the only sail we
+could set and trim and in every way control. It is true the mizzen-braces were
+still rigged aft to the poop, according to Horn practice. But, while we could
+thus trim the mizzen-yards, the sails themselves, in setting or furling, were
+in the hands of the for&rsquo;ard crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret, beside me in the darkness at the break of the poop, put her hand in
+mine with a warm pressure, as both our tiny watches swayed up the spanker and
+as both of us held our breaths in an effort to feel the added draw in the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> speed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never wanted to marry a sailor,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And I thought
+I was safe in the hands of a landsman like you. And yet here you are, with all
+the stuff of the sea in you, running down your easting for port. Next thing, I
+suppose, I&rsquo;ll see you out with a sextant, shooting the sun or making
+star-observations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap46"></a>CHAPTER XLVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Four more days have passed; the gale has blown itself out; we are not more than
+three hundred and fifty miles off Valparaiso; and the <i>Elsinore</i>, this
+time due to me and my own stubbornness, is rolling in the wind and heading
+nowhere in a light breeze at the rate of nothing but driftage per hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the height of the gusts, in the three days and nights of the gale, we logged
+as much as eight, and even nine, knots. What bothered me was the acquiescence
+of the mutineers in my programme. They were sensible enough in the simple
+matter of geography to know what I was doing. They had control of the sails,
+and yet they permitted me to run for the South American coast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than that, as the gale eased on the morning of the third day, they
+actually went aloft, set top-gallant-sails, royals, and skysails, and trimmed
+the yards to the quartering breeze. This was too much for the Saxon streak in
+me, whereupon I wore the <i>Elsinore</i> about before the wind, fetched her up
+upon it, and lashed the wheel. Margaret and I are agreed in the hypothesis that
+their plan is to get inshore until land is sighted, at which time they will
+desert in the boats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But we don&rsquo;t want them to desert,&rdquo; she proclaims with
+flashing eyes. &ldquo;We are bound for Seattle. They must return to duty.
+They&rsquo;ve got to, soon, for they are beginning to starve.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There isn&rsquo;t a navigator aft,&rdquo; I oppose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Promptly she withers me with her scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You, a master of books, by all the sea-blood in your body should be able
+to pick up the theoretics of navigation while I snap my fingers. Furthermore,
+remember that I can supply the seamanship. Why, any squarehead peasant, in a
+six months&rsquo; cramming course at any seaport navigation school, can pass
+the examiners for his navigator&rsquo;s papers. That means six hours for you.
+And less. If you can&rsquo;t, after an hour&rsquo;s reading and an hour&rsquo;s
+practice with the sextant, take a latitude observation and work it out,
+I&rsquo;ll do it for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean you know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean, from the little I know, that I know I can learn to know a
+meridian sight and the working out of it. I mean that I can learn to know
+inside of two hours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange to say, the gale, after easing to a mild breeze, recrudesced in a sort
+of after-clap. With sails untrimmed and flapping, the consequent smashing,
+crashing, and rending of our gear can be imagined. It brought out in alarm
+every man for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trim the yards!&rdquo; I yelled at Bert Rhine, who, backed for counsel
+by Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney, actually came directly beneath me on
+the main deck in order to hear above the commotion aloft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Keep a-runnin, an&rsquo; you won&rsquo;t have to trim,&rdquo; the
+gangster shouted up to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Want to make land, eh?&rdquo; I girded down at him. &ldquo;Getting
+hungry, eh? Well, you won&rsquo;t make land or anything else in a thousand
+years once you get all your top-hamper piled down on deck.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have forgotten to state that this occurred at midday yesterday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you goin&rsquo; to do if we trim?&rdquo; Charles Davis broke
+in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Run off shore,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;and get your gang out in deep
+sea where it will be starved back to duty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll furl, an&rsquo; let you heave to,&rdquo; the gangster
+proposed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head and held up my rifle. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to go aloft to
+do it, and the first man that gets into the shrouds will get this.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then she can go to hell for all we care,&rdquo; he said, with emphatic
+conclusiveness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And just then the fore-topgallant-yard carried away&mdash;luckily as the bow
+was down-pitched into a trough of sea-and when the slow, confused, and tangled
+descent was accomplished the big stick lay across the wreck of both bulwarks
+and of that portion of the bridge between the foremast and the forecastle head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine heard, but could not see, the damage wrought. He looked up at me
+challengingly, and sneered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Want some more to come down?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It could not have happened more apropos. The port-brace, and immediately
+afterwards the starboard-brace, of the crojack-yard&mdash;carried away. This
+was the big, lowest spar on the mizzen, and as the huge thing of steel swung
+wildly back and forth the gangster and his followers turned and crouched as
+they looked up to see. Next, the gooseneck of the truss, on which it pivoted,
+smashed away. Immediately the lifts and lower-topsail sheets parted, and with a
+fore-and-aft pitch of the ship the spar up-ended and crashed to the deck upon
+Number Three hatch, destroying that section of the bridge in its fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was new to the gangster&mdash;as it was to me&mdash;but Charles Davis
+and the Maltese Cockney thoroughly apprehended the situation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand out from under!&rdquo; I yelled sardonically; and the three of
+them cowered and shrank away as their eyes sought aloft for what new spar was
+thundering down upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lower-topsail, its sheets parted by the fall of the crojack-yard, was
+tearing out of the bolt-ropes and ribboning away to leeward and making such an
+uproar that they might well expect its yard to carry away. Since this wreckage
+of our beautiful gear was all new to me, I was quite prepared to see the thing
+happen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gangster-leader, no sailor, but, after months at sea, intelligent enough
+and nervously strong enough to appreciate the danger, turned his head and
+looked up at me. And I will do him the credit to say that he took his time
+while all our world of gear aloft seemed smashing to destruction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess we&rsquo;ll trim yards,&rdquo; he capitulated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Better get the skysails and royals off,&rdquo; Margaret said in my ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;While you&rsquo;re about it, get in the skysails and royals!&rdquo; I
+shouted down. &ldquo;And make a decent job of the gasketing!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney advertised their relief in their
+faces as they heard my words, and, at a nod from the gangster, they started
+for&rsquo;ard on the run to put the orders into effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never, in the whole voyage, did our crew spring to it in more lively fashion.
+And lively fashion was needed to save our gear. As it was, they cut away the
+remnants of the mizzen-lower-topsail with their sheath-knives, and they loosed
+the main-skysail out of its bolt-ropes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first infraction of our agreement was on the main-lower-topsail. This they
+attempted to furl. The carrying away of the crojack and the blowing away of the
+mizzen-lower-topsail gave me freedom to see and aim, and when the tiny
+messengers from my rifle began to spat through the canvas and to spat against
+the steel of the yard, the men strung along it desisted from passing the
+gaskets. I waved my will to Bert Rhine, who acknowledged me and ordered the
+sail set again and the yard trimmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the use of running off-shore?&rdquo; I said to Margaret, when
+the kites were snugged down and all yards trimmed on the wind. &ldquo;Three
+hundred and fifty miles off the land is as good as thirty-five hundred so far
+as starvation is concerned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, instead of making speed through the water toward deep sea, I hove the
+<i>Elsinore</i> to on the starboard tack with no more than leeway driftage to
+the west and south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But our gallant mutineers had their will of us that very night. In the darkness
+we could hear the work aloft going on as yards were run down, sheets let go,
+and sails clew up and gasketed. I did try a few random shots, and all my reward
+was to hear the whine and creak of ropes through sheaves and to receive an
+equally random fire of revolver-shots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a most curious situation. We of the high place are masters of the
+steering of the <i>Elsinore</i>, while those for&rsquo;ard are masters of the
+motor power. The only sail that is wholly ours is the spanker. They control
+absolutely&mdash;sheets, halyards, clewlines, buntlines, braces, and
+down-hauls&mdash;every sail on the fore and main. We control the braces on the
+mizzen, although they control the canvas on the mizzen. For that matter,
+Margaret and I fail to comprehend why they do not go aloft any dark night and
+sever the mizzen-braces at the yard-ends. All that prevents this, we are
+decided, is laziness. For if they did sever the braces that lead aft into our
+hands, they would be compelled to rig new braces for&rsquo;ard in some fashion,
+else, in the rolling, would the mizzenmast be stripped of every spar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still the mutiny we are enduring is ridiculous and grotesque. There was
+never a mutiny like it. It violates all standards and precedents. In the old
+classic mutinies, long ere this, attacking like tigers, the seamen should have
+swarmed over the poop and killed most of us or been most of them killed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wherefore I sneer at our gallant mutineers, and recommend trained nurses for
+them, quite in the manner of Mr. Pike. But Margaret shakes her head and insists
+that human nature is human nature, and that under similar circumstances human
+nature will express itself similarly. In short, she points to the number of
+deaths that have already occurred, and declares that on some dark night, sooner
+or later, whenever the pinch of hunger sufficiently sharpens, we shall see our
+rascals storming aft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the meantime, except for the tenseness of it, and for the incessant
+watchfulness which Margaret and I alone maintain, it is more like a mild
+adventure, more like a page out of some book of romance which ends happily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is surely romance, watch and watch for a man and a woman who love, to
+relieve each other&rsquo;s watches. Each such relief is a love passage and
+unforgettable. Never was there wooing like it&mdash;the muttered surmises of
+wind and weather, the whispered councils, the kissed commands in palms of
+hands, the dared contacts of the dark.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, truly, I have often, since this voyage began, told the books to go hang.
+And yet the books are at the back of the race-life of me. I am what I am out of
+ten thousand generations of my kind. Of that there is no discussion. And yet my
+midnight philosophy stands the test of my breed. I must have selected my books
+out of the ten thousand generations that compose me. I have killed a
+man&mdash;Steve Roberts. As a perishing blond without an alphabet I should have
+done this unwaveringly. As a perishing blond with an alphabet, plus the
+contents in my brain of the philosophizing of all philosophers, I have killed
+this same man with the same unwaveringness. Culture has not emasculated me. I
+am quite unaffected. It was in the day&rsquo;s work, and my kind have always
+been day-workers, doing the day&rsquo;s work, whatever it might be, in high
+adventure or dull ploddingness, and always doing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never would I ask to set back the dial of time or event. I would kill Steve
+Roberts again, under the same circumstances, as a matter of course. When I say
+I am unaffected by this happening I do not quite mean it. I am affected. I am
+aware that the spirit of me is informed with a sober elation of efficiency. I
+have done something that had to be done, as any man will do what has to be done
+in the course of the day&rsquo;s work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, I am a perishing blond, and a man, and I sit in the high place and bend
+the stupid ones to my will; and I am a lover, loving a royal woman of my own
+perishing breed, and together we occupy, and shall occupy, the high place of
+government and command until our kind perish from the earth.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap47"></a>CHAPTER XLVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Margaret was right. The mutiny is not violating standards and precedents. We
+have had our hands full for days and nights. Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed
+Berserker, has been killed by Wada, and the training-ship boy, the one lone
+cadet of our breed, has gone overside with the regulation sack of coal at his
+feet. The poop has been rushed. My illuminating invention has proved a success.
+The men are getting hungry, and we still sit in command in the high place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First of all the attack on the poop, two nights ago, in Margaret&rsquo;s watch.
+No; first, I have made another invention. Assisted by the old steward, who
+knows, as a Chinese ought, a deal about fireworks, and getting my materials
+from our signal rockets and Roman candles, I manufactured half a dozen bombs. I
+don&rsquo;t really think they are very deadly, and I know our extemporized
+fuses are slower than our voyage is at the present time; but nevertheless the
+bombs have served the purpose, as you shall see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now to the attempt to rush the poop. It was in Margaret&rsquo;s watch, from
+midnight till four in the morning, when the attack was made. Sleeping on the
+deck by the cabin skylight, I was very close to her when her revolver went off,
+and continued to go off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first spring was to the tripping-lines on my illuminators. The igniting and
+releasing devices worked cleverly. I pulled two of the tripping-lines, and two
+of the contraptions exploded into light and noise and at the same time ran
+automatically down the jigger-trysail-stays, and automatically fetched up at
+the ends of their lines. The illumination was instantaneous and gorgeous.
+Henry, the two sail-makers, and the steward&mdash;at least three of them
+awakened from sound sleep, I am sure&mdash;ran to join us along the break of
+the poop. All the advantage lay with us, for we were in the dark, while our
+foes were outlined against the light behind them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But such light! The powder crackled, fizzed, and spluttered and spilled out the
+excess of gasolene from the flaming oakum balls so that streams of fire dripped
+down on the main deck beneath. And the stuff of the signal-flares dripped red
+light and blue and green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was not much of a fight, for the mutineers were shocked by our fireworks.
+Margaret fired her revolver haphazardly, while I held my rifle for any that
+gained the poop. But the attack faded away as quickly as it had come. I did see
+Margaret overshoot some man, scaling the poop from the port-rail, and the next
+moment I saw Wada, charging like a buffalo, jab him in the chest with the spear
+he had made and thrust the boarder back and down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. The rest retreated for&rsquo;ard on the dead run, while the three
+trysails, furled at the foot of the stays next to the mizzen and set on fire by
+the dripping gasolene, went up in flame and burned entirely away and out
+without setting the rest of the ship on fire. That is one of the virtues of a
+ship steel-masted and steel-stayed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And on the deck beneath us, crumpled, twisted, face hidden so that we could not
+identify him, lay the man whom Wada had speared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now I come to a phase of adventure that is new to me. I have never found it
+in the books. In short, it is carelessness coupled with laziness, or vice
+versa. I had used two of my illuminators. Only one remained. An hour later,
+convinced of the movement aft of men along the deck, I let go the third and
+last and with its brightness sent them scurrying for&rsquo;ard. Whether they
+were attacking the poop tentatively to learn whether or not I had exhausted my
+illuminators, or whether or not they were trying to rescue Ditman Olansen, we
+shall never know. The point is: they did come aft; they were compelled to
+retreat by my illuminator; and it was my last illuminator. And yet I did not
+start in, there and then, to manufacture fresh ones. This was carelessness. It
+was laziness. And I hazarded our lives, perhaps, if you please, on a
+psychological guess that I had convinced our mutineers that we had an
+inexhaustible stock of illuminators in reserve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest of Margaret&rsquo;s watch, which I shared with her, was undisturbed.
+At four I insisted that she go below and turn in, but she compromised by taking
+my own bed behind the skylight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At break of day I was able to make out the body, still lying as last I had seen
+it. At seven o&rsquo;clock, before breakfast, and while Margaret still slept, I
+sent the two boys, Henry and Buckwheat, down to the body. I stood above them,
+at the rail, rifle in hand and ready. But from for&rsquo;ard came no signs of
+life; and the lads, between them, rolled the crank-eyed Norwegian over so that
+we could recognize him, carried him to the rail, and shoved him stiffly across
+and into the sea. Wada&rsquo;s spear-thrust had gone clear through him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But before twenty-four hours were up the mutineers evened the score handsomely.
+They more than evened it, for we are so few that we cannot so well afford the
+loss of one as they can. To begin with&mdash;and a thing I had anticipated and
+for which I had prepared my bombs&mdash;while Margaret and I ate a
+deck-breakfast in the shelter of the jiggermast a number of the men sneaked aft
+and got under the overhang of the poop. Buckwheat saw them coming and yelled
+the alarm, but it was too late. There was no direct way to get them out. The
+moment I put my head over the rail to fire at them, I knew they would fire up
+at me with all the advantage in their favour. They were hidden. I had to expose
+myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two steel doors, tight-fastened and caulked against the Cape Horn seas, opened
+under the overhang of the poop from the cabin on to the main deck. These doors
+the men proceeded to attack with sledge-hammers, while the rest of the gang,
+sheltered by the &rsquo;midship-house, showed that it stood ready for the rush
+when the doors were battered down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inside, the steward guarded one door with his hacking knife, while with his
+spear Wada guarded the other door. Nor, while I had dispatched them to this
+duty, was I idle. Behind the jiggermast I lighted the fuse of one of my
+extemporized bombs. When it was sputtering nicely I ran across the poop to the
+break and dropped the bomb to the main deck beneath, at the same time making an
+effort to toss it in under the overhang where the men battered at the
+port-door. But this effort was distracted and made futile by a popping of
+several revolver shots from the gangways amidships. One <i>is</i> jumpy when
+soft-nosed bullets putt-putt around him. As a result, the bomb rolled about on
+the open deck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, the illuminators had earned the respect of the mutineers for my
+fireworks. The sputtering and fizzling of the fuse were too much for them, and
+from under the poop they ran for&rsquo;ard like so many scuttling rabbits. I
+know I could have got a couple with my rifle had I not been occupied with
+lighting the fuse of a second bomb. Margaret managed three wild shots with her
+revolver, and the poop was immediately peppered by a scattering revolver fire
+from for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being provident (and lazy, for I have learned that it takes time and labour to
+manufacture home-made bombs), I pinched off the live end of the fuse in my
+hand. But the fuse of the first bomb, rolling about on the main deck, merely
+fizzled on; and as I waited I resolved to shorten my remaining fuses. Any of
+the men who fled, had he had the courage, could have pinched off the fuse, or
+tossed the bomb overboard, or, better yet, he could have tossed it up amongst
+us on the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It took fully five minutes for that blessed fuse to burn its slow length, and
+when the bomb did go off it was a sad disappointment. I swear it could have
+been sat upon with nothing more than a jar to one&rsquo;s nerves. And yet, in
+so far as the intimidation goes, it did its work. The men have not since
+ventured under the overhang of the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the mutineers were getting short of food was patent. The <i>Elsinore</i>,
+sailless, drifted about that morning, the sport of wind and wave; and the gang
+put many lines overboard for the catching of mollyhawks and albatrosses. Oh, I
+worried the hungry fishers with my rifle. No man could show himself
+for&rsquo;ard without having a bullet whop against the iron-work perilously
+near him. And still they caught birds&mdash;not, however, without danger to
+themselves, and not without numerous losses of birds due to my rifle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their procedure was to toss their hooks and bait over the rail from shelter and
+slowly to pay the lines out as the slight windage of the
+<i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> hull, spars, and rigging drifted her through the water.
+When a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter, till it was
+alongside. This was the ticklish moment. The hook, merely a hollow and
+acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on a piece of board at the end
+of the line, held the bird by pinching its curved beak into the acute angle.
+The moment the line slacked the bird was released. So, when alongside, this was
+the problem: to lift the bird out of the water, straight up the side of the
+ship, without once jamming and easing and slacking. When they tried to do this
+from shelter invariably they lost the bird.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They worked out a method. When the bird was alongside the several men with
+revolvers turned loose on me, while one man, overhauling and keeping the line
+taut, leaped to the rail and quickly hove the bird up and over and inboard. I
+know this long-distance revolver fire seriously bothered me. One cannot help
+jumping when death, in the form of a piece of flying lead, hits the rail beside
+him, or the mast over his head, or whines away in a ricochet from the steel
+shrouds. Nevertheless, I managed with my rifle to bother the exposed men on the
+rail to the extent that they lost one hooked bird out of two. And twenty-six
+men require a quantity of albatrosses and mollyhawks every twenty-four hours,
+while they can fish only in the daylight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the day wore along I improved on my obstructive tactics. When the
+<i>Elsinore</i> was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found
+that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could swing her
+bow off. Then, when she had paid off till the wind was abeam, by reversing the
+wheel hard across to the opposite hard-over I could take advantage of her
+momentum away from the wind and work her off squarely before it. This made all
+the wood-floated triangles of bird-snares tow aft along her sides.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first time I was ready for them. With hooks and sinkers on our own lines
+aft, we tossed out, grappled, captured, and broke off nine of their lines. But
+the next time, so slow is the movement of so large a ship, the mutineers hauled
+all their lines safely inboard ere they towed aft within striking distance of
+my grapnels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still I improved. As long as I kept the <i>Elsinore</i> before the wind they
+could not fish. I experimented. Once before it, by means of a winged-out
+spanker coupled with patient and careful steering, I could keep her before it.
+This I did, hour by hour one of my men relieving another at the wheel. As a
+result all fishing ceased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret was holding the first dog-watch, four to six. Henry was at the wheel
+steering. Wada and Louis were below cooking the evening meal over the big
+coal-stove and the oil-burners. I had just come up from below and was standing
+beside the sounding-machine, not half a dozen feet from Henry at the wheel.
+Some obscure sound from the ventilator must have attracted me, for I was gazing
+at it when the thing happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But first, the ventilator. This is a steel shaft that leads up from the
+coal-carrying bowels of the ship beneath the lazarette and that wins to the
+outside-world via the after-wall of the chart-house. In fact, it occupies the
+hollow inside of the double walls of the afterwall of the chart-house. Its
+opening, at the height of a man&rsquo;s head, is screened with iron bars so
+closely set that no mature-bodied rat can squeeze between. Also, this opening
+commands the wheel, which is a scant fifteen feet away and directly across the
+booby-hatch. Some mutineer, crawling along the space between the coal and the
+deck of the lower hold, had climbed the ventilator shaft and was able to take
+aim through the slits between the bars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Practically simultaneously, I saw the out-rush of smoke and heard the report. I
+heard a grunt from Henry, and, turning my head, saw him cling to the spokes and
+turn the wheel half a revolution as he sank to the deck. It must have been a
+lucky shot. The boy was perforated through the heart or very near to the
+heart&mdash;we have no time for post-mortems on the <i>Elsinore</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tom Spink and the second sail-maker, Uchino, sprang to Henry&rsquo;s side. The
+revolver continued to go off through the ventilator slits, and the bullets
+thudded into the front of the half wheel-house all about them. Fortunately they
+were not hit, and they immediately scrambled out of range. The boy quivered for
+the space of a few seconds, and ceased to move; and one more cadet of the
+perishing breed perished as he did his day&rsquo;s work at the wheel of the
+<i>Elsinore</i> off the west coast of South America, bound from Baltimore to
+Seattle with a cargo of coal.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap48"></a>CHAPTER XLVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The situation is hopelessly grotesque. We in the high place command the food of
+the <i>Elsinore</i>, but the mutineers have captured her steering-gear. That is
+to say, they have captured it without coming into possession of it. They cannot
+steer, neither can we. The poop, which is the high place, is ours. The wheel is
+on the poop, yet we cannot touch the wheel. From that slitted opening in the
+ventilator-shaft they are able to shoot down any man who approaches the wheel.
+And with that steel wall of the chart-house as a shield they laugh at us as
+from a conning tower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have a plan, but it is not worth while putting into execution unless its need
+becomes imperative. In the darkness of night it would be an easy trick to
+disconnect the steering-gear from the short tiller on the rudder-head, and
+then, by re-rigging the preventer tackles, steer from both sides of the poop
+well enough for&rsquo;ard to be out of the range of the ventilator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime, in this fine weather, the <i>Elsinore</i> drifts as she lists,
+or as the windage of her lists and the sea-movement of waves lists. And she can
+well drift. Let the mutineers starve. They can best be brought to their senses
+through their stomachs.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And what are wits for, if not for use? I am breaking the men&rsquo;s hungry
+hearts. It is great fun in its way. The mollyhawks and albatrosses, after their
+fashion, have followed the <i>Elsinore</i> up out of their own latitudes. This
+means that there are only so many of them and that their numbers are not
+recruited. Syllogism: major premise, a definite and limited amount of
+bird-meat; minor premise, the only food the mutineers now have is bird-meat;
+conclusion, destroy the available food and the mutineers will be compelled to
+come back to duty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have acted on this bit of logic. I began experimentally by tossing small
+chunks of fat pork and crusts of stale bread overside. When the birds descended
+for the feast I shot them. Every carcass thus left floating on the surface of
+the sea was so much less meat for the mutineers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I bettered the method. Yesterday I overhauled the medicine-chest, and I
+dosed my chunks of fat pork and bread with the contents of every bottle that
+bore a label of skull and cross-bones. I even added rough-on-rats to the
+deadliness of the mixture&mdash;this on the suggestion of the steward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to-day, behold, there is no bird left in the sky. True, while I played my
+game yesterday, the mutineers hooked a few of the birds; but now the rest are
+gone, and that is bound to be the last food for the men for&rsquo;ard until
+they resume duty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes; it is grotesque. It is a boy&rsquo;s game. It reads like Midshipman Easy,
+like Frank Mildmay, like Frank Reade, Jr.; and yet, i&rsquo; faith, life and
+death&rsquo;s in the issue. I have just gone over the toll of our dead since
+the voyage began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First, was Christian Jespersen, killed by O&rsquo;Sullivan when that maniac
+aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay&rsquo;s sea-boots; then O&rsquo;Sullivan,
+because he interfered with Charles Davis&rsquo; sleep, brained by that worthy
+with a steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we began the
+passage of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly by the gangster clique, his life cut
+out of him with knives, his carcass left lying on deck to be found by us and be
+buried by us; and the Samurai, Captain West, a sudden though not a violent
+death, albeit occurring in the midst of all elemental violence as Mr. Pike
+clawed the <i>Elsinore</i> off the lee-shore of the Horn; and Boney the
+Splinter, following, washed overboard to drown as we cleared the sea-gashing
+rock-tooth where the southern tip of the continent bit into the storm-wrath of
+the Antarctic; and the big-footed, clumsy youth of a Finnish carpenter, hove
+overside as a Jonah by his fellows who believed that Finns control the winds;
+and Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley, Rome and Ireland, shot down on the poop and
+flung overboard alive by Mr. Pike, still alive and clinging to the log-line,
+cut adrift by the steward to be eaten alive by great-beaked albatrosses,
+mollyhawks, and sooty-plumaged Cape hens; Steve Roberts, one-time cowboy, shot
+by me as he tried to shoot me; Herman Lunkenheimer, his throat cut before all
+of us by the hound Bombini as Kid Twist stretched the throat taut from behind;
+the two mates, Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in
+what must have been an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by Wada
+as he charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to rush the
+poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at the wheel,
+from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his day&rsquo;s work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just made I see
+that we are not playing a boy&rsquo;s game. Why, we have lost a third of us,
+and the bloodiest battles of history have rarely achieved such a percentage of
+mortality. Fourteen of us have gone overside, and who can tell the end?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, here we are, masters of matter, adventurers in the micro-organic,
+planet-weighers, sun-analysers, star-rovers, god-dreamers, equipped with the
+human wisdom of all the ages, and yet, quoting Mr. Pike, to come down to brass
+tacks, we are a lot of primitive beasts, fighting bestially, slaying bestially,
+pursuing bestially food and water, air for our lungs, a dry space above the
+deep, and carcasses skin-covered and intact. And over this menagerie of beasts
+Margaret and I, with our Asiatics under us, rule top-dog. We are all
+dogs&mdash;there is no getting away from it. And we, the fair-pigmented ones,
+by the seed of our ancestry rulers in the high place, shall remain top-dog over
+the rest of the dogs. Oh, there is material in plenty for the cogitation of any
+philosopher on a windjammer in mutiny in this Year of our Lord 1913.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Henry was the fourteenth of us to go overside into the dark and salty
+disintegration of the sea. And in one day he has been well avenged; for two of
+the mutineers have followed him. The steward called my attention to what was
+taking place. He touched my arm half beyond his servant&rsquo;s self, as he
+gloated for&rsquo;ard at the men heaving two corpses overside. Weighted with
+coal, they sank immediately, so that we could not identify them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They have been fighting,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;It is good that they
+should fight among themselves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the old Chinese merely grinned and shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think they have been fighting?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No fight. They eat&rsquo;m mollyhawk and albatross; mollyhawk and
+albatross eat&rsquo;m fat pork; two men he die, plenty men much sick, you bet,
+damn to hell me very much glad. I savve.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I think he was right. While I was busy baiting the sea-birds the mutineers
+were catching them, and of a surety they must have caught some that had eaten
+of my various poisons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two poisoned ones went over the side yesterday. Since then we have taken
+the census. Two men only have not appeared, and they are Bob, the fat and
+overgrown feebling youth, and, of all creatures, the Faun. It seems my fate
+that I had to destroy the Faun&mdash;the poor, tortured Faun, always willing
+and eager, ever desirous to please. There is a madness of ill luck in all this.
+Why couldn&rsquo;t the two dead men have been Charles Davis and Tony the Greek?
+Or Bert Rhine and Kid Twist? or Bombini and Andy Fay? Yes, and in my heart I
+know I should have felt better had it been Isaac Chantz and Arthur Deacon, or
+Nancy and Sundry Buyers, or Shorty and Larry.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steward has just tendered me a respectful bit of advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Next time we chuck&rsquo;m overboard like Henry, much better we use old
+iron.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Getting short of coal?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded affirmation. We use a great deal of coal in our cooking, and when the
+present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a bulkhead to get at the
+cargo.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap49"></a>CHAPTER XLIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The situation grows tense. There are no more sea-birds, and the mutineers are
+starving. Yesterday I talked with Bert Rhine. To-day I talked with him again,
+and he will never forget, I am certain, the little talk we had this morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To begin with, last evening, at five o&rsquo;clock, I heard his voice issuing
+from between the slits of the ventilator in the after-wall of the chart-house.
+Standing at the corner of the house, quite out of range, I answered him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Getting hungry?&rdquo; I jeered. &ldquo;Let me tell you what we are
+going to have for dinner. I have just been down and seen the preparations. Now,
+listen: first, caviare on toast; then, clam bouillon; and creamed lobster; and
+tinned lamb chops with French peas&mdash;you know, the peas that melt in
+one&rsquo;s mouth; and California asparagus with mayonnaise; and&mdash;oh, I
+forgot to mention fried potatoes and cold pork and beans; and peach pie; and
+coffee, real coffee. Doesn&rsquo;t it make you hungry for your East Side? And,
+say, think of the free lunch going to waste right now in a thousand saloons in
+good old New York.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had told him the truth. The dinner I described (principally coming out of
+tins and bottles, to be sure) was the dinner we were to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cut that,&rdquo; he snarled. &ldquo;I want to talk business with
+<i>you</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Right down to brass tacks,&rdquo; I gibed. &ldquo;Very well, when are
+you and the rest of your rats going to turn to?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cut that,&rdquo; he reiterated. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got you where 1 want
+you now. Take it from me, I&rsquo;m givin&rsquo; it straight. I&rsquo;m not
+tellin&rsquo; you how, but I&rsquo;ve got you under my thumb. When I come down
+on you, you&rsquo;ll crack.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hell is full of cocksure rats like you,&rdquo; I retorted; although I
+never dreamed how soon he would be writhing in the particular hell preparing
+for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Forget it,&rdquo; he sneered back. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got you where I
+want you. I&rsquo;m just tellin&rsquo; you, that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;when I tell you that I&rsquo;m from
+Missouri. You&rsquo;ll have to show <i>me</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I naturally sought
+out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to make myself intelligible to
+him. The situation was bestial, with sixteen of our complement already gone
+into the dark; and the terms I employed, perforce, were terms of bestiality.
+And I thought, also, of I who was thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the
+utopians, the visions of the poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in
+a discussion with this ripened product of the New York City inferno. To him I
+must talk in the elemental terms of life and death, of food and water, of
+brutality and cruelty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I give you your choice,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Give in now, an&rsquo;
+you won&rsquo;t be hurt, none of you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And if we don&rsquo;t?&rdquo; I dared airily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be sorry you was ever born. You ain&rsquo;t a mush-head,
+you&rsquo;ve got a girl there that&rsquo;s stuck on you. It&rsquo;s about time
+you think of her. You ain&rsquo;t altogether a mutt. You get my drive?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of all I had
+ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at Peking, and of the plans
+of the white men for their womenkind in the event of the yellow hordes breaking
+through the last lines of defence. Ay, and the old steward got it; for I saw
+his black eyes glint murderously in their narrow, tilted slits. He knew the
+drift of the gangster&rsquo;s meaning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You get my drive?&rdquo; the gangster repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I knew anger. Not ordinary anger, but cold anger. And I caught a vision of
+the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the ages in all lands, on all
+seas. I saw my kind, our women with us, in forlorn hopes and lost endeavours,
+pent in hill fortresses, rotted in jungle fastnesses, cut down to the last one
+on the decks of rocking ships. And always, our women with us, had we ruled the
+beasts. We might die, our women with us; but, living, we had ruled. It was a
+royal vision I glimpsed. Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the ethic, which
+was the stuff of the fabric of which it was builded. It was the sacred trust of
+the seed, the bequest of duty handed down from all ancestors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I flamed more coldly. It was not red-brute anger. It was intellectual. It
+was based on concept and history; it was the philosophy of action of the strong
+and the pride of the strong in their own strength. Now at last I knew
+Nietzsche. I knew the rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to
+high-conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the high
+place on the poop of a coal-carrier in the year nineteen-thirteen, my woman
+beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed servitors under me, the beasts
+beneath me and beneath the heel of me. God! I felt kingly. I knew at last the
+meaning of kingship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My anger was white and cold. This subterranean rat of a miserable human,
+crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and mine! A rat in the
+shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-like as any rat ever made! And
+it was in this spirit that I answered the gangster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad light of
+day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience, and when you show by
+your every action that you like it and are glad to do it, then, and not until
+then, will I talk with you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate of his
+kind at me through the slits in the ventilator. But I made no reply. I
+listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew why the English had
+blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of cannon in India long years ago.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-gallon carboy
+of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime I was devising another way to overcome that deadly ventilator
+shaft. The scheme was so simple that I was shamed in that it had not occurred
+to me at the very beginning. The slitted opening was small. Two sacks of flour,
+in a wooden frame, suspended by ropes from the edge of the chart-house roof
+directly above, would effectually cover the opening and block all revolver
+fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No sooner thought than done. Tom Spink and Louis were on top the chart-house
+with me and preparing to lower the flour, when we heard a voice issuing from
+the shaft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s in there now?&rdquo; I demanded. &ldquo;Speak up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m givin&rsquo; you a last chance,&rdquo; Bert Rhine answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And just then, around the corner of the house, stepped the steward. In his hand
+he carried a large galvanized pail, and my casual thought was that he had come
+to get rain-water from the barrels. Even as I thought it, he made a sweeping
+half-circle with the pail and sloshed its contents into the ventilator-opening.
+And even as the liquid flew through the air I knew it for what it
+was&mdash;undiluted sulphuric acid, two gallons of it from the carboy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gangster must have received the liquid fire in the face and eyes. And, in
+the shock of pain, he must have released all holds and fallen upon the coal at
+the bottom of the shaft. His cries and shrieks of anguish were terrible, and I
+was reminded of the starving rats which had squealed up that same shaft during
+the first months of the voyage. The thing was sickening. I prefer that men be
+killed cleanly and easily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The agony of the wretch I did not fully realize until the steward, his bare
+fore-arms sprayed by the splash from the ventilator slats, suddenly felt the
+bite of the acid through his tight, whole skin and made a mad rush for the
+water-barrel at the corner of the house. And Bert Rhine, the silent man of
+soundless laughter, screaming below there on the coal, was enduring the bite of
+the acid in his eyes!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We covered the ventilator opening with our flour-device; the screams from below
+ceased as the victim was evidently dragged for&rsquo;ard across the coal by his
+mates; and yet I confess to a miserable forenoon. As Carlyle has said:
+&ldquo;Death is easy; all men must die&rdquo;; but to receive two gallons of
+full-strength sulphuric acid full in the face is a vastly different and vastly
+more horrible thing than merely to die. Fortunately, Margaret was below at the
+time, and, after a few minutes, in which I recovered my balance, I bullied and
+swore all our hands into keeping the happening from her.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, well, and we have got ours in retaliation. Off and on, through all of
+yesterday, after the ventilator tragedy, there were noises beneath the cabin
+floor or deck. We heard them under the dining-table, under the steward&rsquo;s
+pantry, under Margaret&rsquo;s stateroom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This deck is overlaid with wood, but under the wood is iron, or steel rather,
+such as of which the whole <i>Elsinore</i> is builded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret and I, followed by Louis, Wada, and the steward, walked about from
+place to place, wherever the sounds arose of tappings and of cold-chisels
+against iron. The tappings seemed to come from everywhere; but we concluded
+that the concentration necessary on any spot to make an opening large enough
+for a man&rsquo;s body would inevitably draw our attention to that spot. And,
+as Margaret said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If they do manage to cut through, they must come up head-first, and, in
+such emergence, what chance would they have against us?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So I relieved Buckwheat from deck duty, placed him on watch over the cabin
+floor, to be relieved by the steward in Margaret&rsquo;s watches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the late afternoon, after prodigious hammerings and clangings in a score of
+places, all noises ceased. Neither in the first and second dog-watches, nor in
+the first watch of the night, were the noises resumed. When I took charge of
+the poop at midnight Buckwheat relieved the steward in the vigil over the cabin
+floor; and as I leaned on the rail at the break of the poop, while my four
+hours dragged slowly by, least of all did I apprehend danger from the
+cabin&mdash;especially when I considered the two-gallon pail of raw sulphuric
+acid ready to hand for the first head that might arise through an opening in
+the floor not yet made. Our rascals for&rsquo;ard might scale the poop; or
+cross aloft from mizzenmast to jigger and descend upon our heads; but how they
+could invade us through the floor was beyond me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But they did invade. A modern ship is a complex affair. How was I to guess the
+manner of the invasion?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was two in the morning, and for an hour I had been puzzling my head with
+watching the smoke arise from the after-division of the for&rsquo;ard-house and
+with wondering why the mutineers should have up steam in the donkey-engine at
+such an ungodly hour. Not on the whole voyage had the donkey-engine been used.
+Four bells had just struck, and I was leaning on the rail at the break of the
+poop when I heard a prodigious coughing and choking from aft. Next, Wada ran
+across the deck to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Big trouble with Buckwheat,&rdquo; he blurted at me. &ldquo;You go
+quick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shoved him my rifle and left him on guard while I raced around the
+chart-house. A lighted match, in the hands of Tom Spink, directed me. Between
+the booby-hatch and the wheel, sitting up and rocking back and forth with
+wringings of hands and wavings of arms, tears of agony bursting from his eyes,
+was Buckwheat. My first thought was that in some stupid way he had got the acid
+into his own eyes. But the terrible fashion in which he coughed and strangled
+would quickly have undeceived me, had not Louis, bending over the
+booby-companion, uttered a startled exclamation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made me catch my
+breath and gasp. I had inhaled sulphur. On the instant I forgot the
+<i>Elsinore</i>, the mutineers for&rsquo;ard, everything save one thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily about the big
+after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and strangled me. By the dim light
+of a sea-lantern I saw the old steward, on hands and knees, coughing and
+gasping, the while he shook awake Yatsuda, the first sail-maker. Uchino, the
+second sail-maker, still strangled in his sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I proved it
+when I dropped on my hands and knees. I rolled Uchino out of his blankets with
+a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my head, face, and mouth, arose to my
+feet, and dashed for&rsquo;ard into the hall. After a couple of collisions with
+the wood-work I again dropped to the floor and rearranged the blankets so that,
+while my mouth remained covered, I could draw or withdraw, a thickness across
+my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the dizziness I
+suffered. I blundered into the steward&rsquo;s pantry, and out of it, missed
+the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard opening in the long hall,
+and found myself bent double by violent collision with the dining-room table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I had my bearings. Feeling my way around the table and bumping most of the
+poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied stove, I emerged in the
+cross-hall and made my way to starboard. Here, at the base of the chart-room
+stairway, I gained the hall that led aft. By this time my own situation seemed
+so serious that, careless of any collision, I went aft in long leaps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret&rsquo;s door was open. I plunged into her room. The moment I drew the
+blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a modicum of what Bert
+Rhine must have suffered. Oh, the intolerable bite of the sulphur in my lungs,
+nostrils, eyes, and brain! No light burned in the room. I could only strangle
+and stumble for&rsquo;ard to Margaret&rsquo;s bed, upon which I collapsed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was not there. I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her body had
+left in the under-sheet. Even in my agony and helplessness the intimacy of that
+warmth her body had left was very dear to me. Between the lack of oxygen in my
+lungs (due to the blankets), the pain of the sulphur, and the mortal dizziness
+in my brain, I felt that I might well cease there where the linen warmed my
+hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing from along
+the hall. It was new life to me. I fell from bed to floor and managed to get
+upright until I gained the hall, where again I fell. Thereafter I crawled on
+hands and knees to the foot of the stairway. By means of the newel-post I drew
+myself upright and listened. Near me something moved and strangled. I fell upon
+it and found in my arms all the softness of Margaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How describe that battle up the stairway? It was a crucifixion of struggle, an
+age-long nightmare of agony. Time after time, as my consciousness blurred, the
+temptation was upon me to cease all effort and let myself blur down into the
+ultimate dark. I fought my way step by step. Margaret was now quite
+unconscious, and I lifted her body step by step, or dragged it several steps at
+a time, and fell with it, and back with it, and lost much that had been so
+hardly gained. And yet out of it all this I remember: that warm soft body of
+hers was the dearest thing in the world&mdash;vastly more dear than the
+pleasant land I remotely remembered, than all the books and all the humans I
+had ever known, than the deck above, with its sweet pure air softly blowing
+under the cool starry sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of leaving her
+there and saving myself never crossed my mind. The one place for me was where
+she was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not absurd during
+those long minutes on the chart-room stairway. One must taste death for a few
+centuries of such agony ere he can receive sanction for purple passages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed that upward
+way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out upon the poop might
+not be shut. Life and death lay right there in that one point of the issue. Was
+there any creature of my creatures aft with common sense and anticipation
+sufficient to make him think to open those doors? How I yearned for one man,
+for one proved henchman, such as Mr. Pike, to be on the poop! As it was, with
+the sole exception of Tom Spink and Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my feet. Nor
+could I rise upright on my knees. I crawled like any four-legged
+animal&mdash;nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the deck. It was a
+matter of several feet to the doorway. I died a score of times in those several
+feet; but ever I endured the agony of resurrection and dragged Margaret with
+me. Sometimes the full strength I could exert did not move her, and I lay with
+her and coughed and strangled my way through to another resurrection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the door was open. The doors to starboard and to port were both open; and
+as the <i>Elsinore</i> rolled a draught through the chart-house hall my lungs
+filled with pure, cool air. As I drew myself across the high threshold and
+pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I heard the cries of men and the
+reports of rifle and revolver. And, ere I fainted into the blackness, on my
+side, staring, my pain gone so beyond endurance that it had achieved its own
+an&aelig;sthesia, I glimpsed, dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted
+poop-rail, dark forms that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the
+mizzen-mast brightly lighted by our illuminators.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop. My five Asiatics and two white men
+had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay unconscious side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole affair was very simple. Modern maritime quarantine demands that ships
+shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers. In the
+donkey-engine section of the for&rsquo;ard house is a complete fumigating
+apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the pipes aft across the
+coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of steel and wood under the
+cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump. Buckwheat had fallen asleep and
+been awakened by the strangling sulphur fumes. We in the high place had been
+smoked out by our rascals like so many rats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Wada who had opened one of the doors. The old steward had opened the
+other. Together they had attempted the descent of the stairway and been driven
+back by the fumes. Then they had engaged in the struggle to repel the rush from
+for&rsquo;ard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves the lungs
+sore. Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we draw breath in anything
+that resembles comfort. But still my lungs were not so sore as to prevent my
+telling her what I had learned she meant to me. And yet she is only a
+woman&mdash;I tell her so; I tell her that there are at least seven hundred and
+fifty millions of two-legged, long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female
+humans like her on the planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity
+of numbers of her sex and kind. But I tell her something more. I tell her that
+of all of them she is the only one. And, better yet, to myself and for myself,
+I believe it. I know it. The last least part of me and all of me proclaims it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Love <i>is</i> wonderful. It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement. Oh,
+trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and calculating
+and classifying love. It is a profound foolishness, a cosmic trick and quip, to
+the contemplative eye of the philosopher&mdash;yes, and of the futurist. But
+when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male
+human, in short, a lover, then all he may do, and which is what he cannot help
+doing, is to yield to the compulsions of being and throw both his arms around
+love and hold it closer to him than is his own heart close to him. This is the
+summit of his life, and of man&rsquo;s life. Higher than this no man may rise.
+The philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks far below. He who has not
+loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of living. I know. I love Margaret, a
+woman. She is desirable.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap50"></a>CHAPTER L.</h2>
+
+<p>
+In the past twenty-four hours many things have happened. To begin with, we
+nearly lost the steward in the second dog-watch last evening. Through the slits
+in the ventilator some man thrust a knife into the sacks of flour and cut them
+wide open from top to bottom. In the dark the flour poured to the deck
+unobserved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, the man behind could not see through the screen of empty sacks, but
+he took a blind pot-shot at point-blank range when the steward went by,
+slip-sloppily dragging the heels of his slippers. Fortunately it was a miss,
+but so close a miss was it that his cheek and neck were burned with powder
+grains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At six bells in the first watch came another surprise. Tom Spink came to me
+where I stood guard at the for&rsquo;ard end of the poop. His voice shook as he
+spoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the love of God, sir, they&rsquo;ve come,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who?&rdquo; I asked sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Them,&rdquo; he chattered. &ldquo;The ones that come aboard off the
+Horn, sir, the three drownded sailors. They&rsquo;re there, aft, sir, the three
+of &rsquo;em, standin&rsquo; in a row by the wheel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How did they get there?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bein&rsquo; warlocks, they flew, sir. You didn&rsquo;t see &rsquo;m go
+by you, did you, sir?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; I admitted. &ldquo;They never went by me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Tom Spink groaned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there are lines aloft there on which they could cross over from
+mizzen to jigger,&rdquo; I added. &ldquo;Send Wada to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the latter relieved me I went aft. And there in a row were our three
+pale-haired storm-waifs with the topaz eyes. In the light of a
+bull&rsquo;s-eye, held on them by Louis, their eyes never seemed more like the
+eyes of great cats. And, heavens, they purred! At least, the inarticulate
+noises they made sounded more like purring than anything else. That these
+sounds meant friendliness was very evident. Also, they held out their hands,
+palms upward, in unmistakable sign of peace. Each in turn doffed his cap and
+placed my hand for a moment on his head. Without doubt this meant their offer
+of fealty, their acceptance of me as master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I nodded my head. There was nothing to be said to men who purred like cats,
+while sign-language in the light of the bull&rsquo;s-eye was rather difficult.
+Tom Spink groaned protest when I told Louis to take them below and give them
+blankets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I made the sleep-sign to them, and they nodded gratefully, hesitated, then
+pointed to their mouths and rubbed their stomachs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drowned men do not eat,&rdquo; I laughed to Tom Spink. &ldquo;Go down
+and watch them. Feed them up, Louis, all they want. It&rsquo;s a good sign of
+short rations for&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of half an hour Tom Spink was back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, did they eat?&rdquo; I challenged him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was unconvinced. The very quantity they had eaten was a suspicious
+thing, and, further, he had heard of a kind of ghost that devoured dead bodies
+in graveyards. Therefore, he concluded, mere non-eating was no test for a
+ghost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The third event of moment occurred this morning at seven o&rsquo;clock. The
+mutineers called for a truce; and when Nosey Murphy, the Maltese Cockney, and
+the inevitable Charles Davis stood beneath me on the main deck, their faces
+showed lean and drawn. Famine had been my great ally. And in truth, with
+Margaret beside me in that high place of the break of the poop, as I looked
+down on the hungry wretches I felt very strong. Never had the inequality of
+numbers fore and aft been less than now. The three deserters, added to our own
+nine, made twelve of us, while the mutineers, after subtracting Ditman Olansen,
+Bob and the Faun, totalled only an even score. And of these Bert Rhine must
+certainly be in a bad way, while there were many weaklings, such as Sundry
+Buyers, Nancy, Larry, and Lars Jacobsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what do you want?&rdquo; I demanded. &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t much
+time to waste. Breakfast is ready and waiting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charles Davis started to speak, but I shut him off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have nothing out of you, Davis. At least not now. Later on,
+when I&rsquo;m in that court of law you&rsquo;ve bothered me with for half the
+voyage, you&rsquo;ll get your turn at talking. And when that time comes
+don&rsquo;t forget that I shall have a few words to say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again he began, but this time was stopped by Nosey Murphy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aw, shut your trap, Davis,&rdquo; the gangster snarled, &ldquo;or
+I&rsquo;ll shut it for you.&rdquo; He glanced up to me. &ldquo;We want to go
+back to work, that&rsquo;s what we want.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Which is not the way to ask for it,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; he added hastily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s better,&rdquo; I commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, my God, sir, don&rsquo;t let &rsquo;m come aft.&rdquo; Tom Spink
+muttered hurriedly in my ear. &ldquo;That&rsquo;d be the end of all of us. And
+even if they didn&rsquo;t get you an&rsquo; the rest, they&rsquo;d heave me
+over some dark night. They ain&rsquo;t never goin&rsquo; to forgive me, sir,
+for joinin&rsquo; in with the afterguard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I ignored the interruption and addressed the gangster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing like going to work when you want to as badly as
+you seem to. Suppose all hands get sail on her just to show good
+intention.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;d like to eat first, sir,&rdquo; he objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to see you setting sail, first,&rdquo; was my reply.
+&ldquo;And you may as well get it from me straight that what I like goes,
+aboard this ship.&rdquo;&mdash;I almost said &ldquo;hooker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nosey Murphy hesitated and looked to the Maltese Cockney for counsel. The
+latter debated, as if gauging the measure of his weakness while he stared aloft
+at the work involved. Finally he nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, sir,&rdquo; the gangster spoke up. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll do it .
+. . but can&rsquo;t something be cookin&rsquo; in the galley while we&rsquo;re
+doin&rsquo; it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shook my head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t have that in mind, and I don&rsquo;t care to change my
+mind now. When every sail is stretched and every yard braced, and all that mess
+of gear cleared up, food for a good meal will be served out. You needn&rsquo;t
+bother about the spanker nor the mizzen-braces. We&rsquo;ll make your work
+lighter by that much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In truth, as they climbed aloft they showed how miserably weak they were. There
+were some too feeble to go aloft. Poor Sundry Buyers continually pressed his
+abdomen as he toiled around the deck-capstans; and never was Nancy&rsquo;s face
+quite so forlorn as when he obeyed the Maltese Cockney&rsquo;s command and went
+up to loose the mizzen-skysail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In passing, I must note one delicious miracle that was worked before our eyes.
+They were hoisting the mizzen-upper-topsail-yard by means of one of the patent
+deck-capstans. Although they had reversed the gear so as to double the
+purchase, they were having a hard time of it. Lars Jacobsen was limping on his
+twice-broken leg, and with him were Sundry Buyers, Tony the Greek, Bombini, and
+Mulligan Jacobs. Nosey Murphy held the turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they stopped from sheer exhaustion Murphy&rsquo;s glance chanced to fall
+on Charles Davis, the one man who had not worked since the outset of the voyage
+and who was not working now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bear a hand, Davis,&rdquo; the gangster called.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret gurgled low laughter in my ear as she caught the drift of the episode.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sea-lawyer looked at the other in amazement ere he answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After nodding Sundry Buyers over to him to take the turn Murphy straightened
+his back and walked close to Davis, then said very quietly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all. For a space neither spoke. Davis seemed to be giving the matter
+judicial consideration. The men at the capstan panted, rested, and looked
+on&mdash;all save Bombini, who slunk across the deck until he stood at
+Murphy&rsquo;s shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under such circumstances the decision Charles Davis gave was eminently the
+right one, although even then he offered a compromise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll hold the turn,&rdquo; he volunteered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll lump around one of them capstan-bars,&rdquo; Murphy said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sea-lawyer made no mistake. He knew in all absoluteness that he was
+choosing between life and death, and he limped over to the capstan and found
+his place. And as the work started, and as he toiled around and around the
+narrow circle, Margaret and I shamelessly and loudly laughed our approval. And
+our own men stole for&rsquo;ard along the poop to peer down at the spectacle of
+Charles Davis at work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which must have pleased Nosey Murphy, for, as he continued to hold the
+turn and coil down, he kept a critical eye on Davis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More juice, Davis!&rdquo; he commanded with abrupt sharpness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Davis, with a startle, visibly increased his efforts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was too much for our fellows, who, Asiatics and all, applauded with
+laughter and hand-clapping. And what could I do? It was a gala day, and our
+faithful ones deserved some little recompense of amusement. So I ignored the
+breach of discipline and of poop etiquette by strolling away aft with Margaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the wheel was one of our storm-waifs. I set the course due east for
+Valparaiso, and sent the steward below to bring up sufficient food for one
+substantial meal for the mutineers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When do we get our next grub, sir?&rdquo; Nosey Murphy asked, as the
+steward served the supplies down to him from the poop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At midday,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;And as long as you and your gang
+are good, you&rsquo;ll get your grub three times each day. You can choose your
+own watches any way you please. But the ship&rsquo;s work must be done, and
+done properly. If it isn&rsquo;t, then the grub stops. That will do. Now go
+for&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One thing more, sir,&rdquo; he said quickly. &ldquo;Bert Rhine is awful
+bad. He can&rsquo;t see, sir. It looks like he&rsquo;s going to lose his face.
+He can&rsquo;t sleep. He groans all the time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a busy day. I made a selection of things from the medicine-chest for the
+acid-burned gangster; and, finding that Murphy knew how to manipulate a
+hypodermic syringe, entrusted him with one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, too, I practised with the sextant and think I fairly caught the sun at
+noon and correctly worked up the observation. But this is latitude, and is
+comparatively easy. Longitude is more difficult. But I am reading up on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All afternoon a gentle northerly fan of air snored the <i>Elsinore</i> through
+the water at a five-knot clip, and our course lay east for land, for the
+habitations of men, for the law and order that men institute whenever they
+organize into groups. Once in Valparaiso, with police flag flying, our
+mutineers will be taken care of by the shore authorities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another thing I did was to rearrange our watches aft so as to split up the
+three storm-visitors. Margaret took one in her watch, along with the two
+sail-makers, Tom Spink, and Louis. Louis is half white, and all trustworthy, so
+that, at all times, on deck or below, he is told off to the task of never
+letting the topaz-eyed one out of his sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In my watch are the steward, Buckwheat, Wada, and the other two topaz-eyed
+ones. And to one of them Wada is told off; and to the other is assigned the
+steward. We are not taking any chances. Always, night and day, on duty or off,
+these storm-strangers will have one of our proved men watching them.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes; and I tried the stranger men out last evening. It was after a council with
+Margaret. She was sure, and I agreed with her, that the men for&rsquo;ard are
+not blindly yielding to our bringing them in to be prisoners in Valparaiso. As
+we tried to forecast it, their plan is to desert the <i>Elsinore</i> in the
+boats as soon as we fetch up with the land. Also, considering some of the
+bitter lunatic spirits for&rsquo;ard, there would be a large chance of their
+drilling the <i>Elsinore&rsquo;s</i> steel sides and scuttling her ere they
+took to the boats. For scuttling a ship is surely as ancient a practice as
+mutiny on the high seas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was, at one in the morning, that I tried out our strangers. Two of them I
+took for&rsquo;ard with me in the raid on the small boats. One I left beside
+Margaret, who kept charge of the poop. On the other side of him stood the
+steward with his big hacking knife. By signs I had made it clear to him, and to
+his two comrades who were to accompany me for&rsquo;ard, that at the first sign
+of treachery he would be killed. And not only did the old steward, with signs
+emphatic and unmistakable, pledge himself to perform the execution, but we were
+all convinced that he was eager for the task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With Margaret I also left Buckwheat and Tom Spink. Wada, the two sail-makers,
+Louis, and the two topaz-eyed ones accompanied me. In addition to fighting
+weapons we were armed with axes. We crossed the main deck unobserved, gained
+the bridge by way of the &rsquo;midship-house, and by way of the bridge gained
+the top of the for&rsquo;ard-house. Here were the first boats we began work on;
+but, first of all, I called in the lookout from the forecastle-head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was Mulligan Jacobs; and he picked his way back across the wreck of the
+bridge where the fore-topgallant-yard still lay, and came up to me unafraid, as
+implacable and bitter as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jacobs,&rdquo; I whispered, &ldquo;you are to stay here beside me until
+we finish the job of smashing the boats. Do you get that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As though it could fright me,&rdquo; he growled all too loudly.
+&ldquo;Go ahead for all I care. I know your game. And I know the game of the
+hell&rsquo;s maggots under our feet this minute. &rsquo;Tis they that&rsquo;d
+desert in the boats. &rsquo;Tis you that&rsquo;ll smash the boats an&rsquo;
+jail &rsquo;m kit an&rsquo; crew.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;S-s-s-h,&rdquo; I vainly interpolated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What of it?&rdquo; he went on as loudly as ever. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re
+sleepin&rsquo; with full bellies. The only night watch we keep is the lookout.
+Even Rhine&rsquo;s asleep. A few jolts of the needle has put a clapper to his
+eternal moanin&rsquo;. Go on with your work. Smash the boats. &rsquo;Tis
+nothin&rsquo; I care. &rsquo;Tis well I know my own crooked back is worth more
+to me than the necks of the scum of the world below there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you felt that way, why didn&rsquo;t you join us?&rdquo; I queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because I like you no better than them an&rsquo; not half so well. They
+are what you an&rsquo; your fathers have made &rsquo;em. An&rsquo; who in hell
+are you an&rsquo; your fathers? Robbers of the toil of men. I like them little.
+I like you and your fathers not at all. Only I like myself and me crooked back
+that&rsquo;s a livin&rsquo; proof there ain&rsquo;t no God and makes Browning a
+liar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Join us now,&rdquo; I urged, meeting him in his mood. &ldquo;It will be
+easier for your back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To hell with you,&rdquo; was his answer. &ldquo;Go ahead an&rsquo; smash
+the boats. You can hang some of them. But you can&rsquo;t touch me with the
+law. &rsquo;Tis me that&rsquo;s a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak
+to raise a hand against any man&mdash;a feather blown about by the windy
+contention of men strong in their back an&rsquo; brainless in their
+heads.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As you please,&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As I can&rsquo;t help pleasin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he retorted,
+&ldquo;bein&rsquo; what I am an&rsquo; so made for the little flash between the
+darknesses which men call life. Now why couldn&rsquo;t I a-ben a butterfly, or
+a fat pig in a full trough, or a mere mortal man with a straight back an&rsquo;
+women to love me? Go on an&rsquo; smash the boats. Play hell to the top of your
+bent. Like me, you&rsquo;ll end in the darkness. And your darkness&rsquo;ll
+be&mdash;as dark as mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A full belly puts the spunk back into you,&rdquo; I sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid.
+Go on an&rsquo; smash the boats.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whose idea was the sulphur?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not tellin&rsquo; you the man, but I envied him until it
+showed failure. An&rsquo; whose idea was it&mdash;to douse the sulphuric into
+Rhine&rsquo;s face? He&rsquo;ll lose that same face, from the way it&rsquo;s
+shedding.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor will I tell you,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Though I will tell you that I
+am glad the idea was not mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; he muttered cryptically, &ldquo;different customs on
+different ships, as the cook said when he went for&rsquo;ard to cast off the
+spanker sheet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time to work
+out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea. Mulligan Jacobs
+might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he not been born crooked
+with a crooked back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And we smashed the boats. With axes and sledges it was an easier task than I
+had imagined. On top of both houses we left the boats masses of splintered
+wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most energetically; and we regained the
+poop without a shot being fired. The forecastle turned out, of course, at our
+noise, but made no attempt to interfere with us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And right here I register another complaint against the sea-novelists. A score
+of men for&rsquo;ard, desperate all, with desperate deeds behind them, and jail
+and the gallows facing them not many days away, should have only begun to
+fight. And yet this score of men did nothing while we destroyed their last
+chance for escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But where did they get the grub?&rdquo; the steward asked me afterwards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr. Pike began
+cudgelling his brains over it. I wonder, had I asked Mulligan Jacobs the
+question, if he would have told me? At any rate, in court at Valparaiso that
+question will be answered. In the meantime I suppose I shall submit to having
+the steward ask me it daily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is murder and mutiny on the high seas,&rdquo; I told them this
+morning, when they came aft in a body to complain about the destruction of the
+boats and to demand my intentions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as I looked down upon the poor wretches from the break of the poop,
+standing there in the high place, the vision of my kind down all its mad,
+violent, and masterful past was strong upon me. Already, since our departure
+from Baltimore, three other men, masters, had occupied this high place and gone
+their way&mdash;the Samurai, Mr. Pike, and Mr. Mellaire. I stood here, fourth,
+no seaman, merely a master by the blood of my ancestors; and the work of the
+<i>Elsinore</i> in the world went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine, his head and face swathed in bandages, stood there beneath me, and
+I felt for him a tingle of respect. He, too, in a subterranean, ghetto way was
+master over his rats. Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist stood shoulder to shoulder
+with their stricken gangster leader. It was his will, because of his terrible
+injury, to get in to land and doctors as quickly as possible. He preferred
+taking his chance in court against the chance of losing his life, or, perhaps,
+his eyesight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crew was divided against itself; and Isaac Chantz, the Jew, his wounded
+shoulder with a hunch to it, seemed to lead the revolt against the gangsters.
+His wound was enough to convict him in any court, and well he knew it. Beside
+him, and at his shoulders, clustered the Maltese Cockney, Andy Fay, Arthur
+Deacon, Frank Fitzgibbon, Richard Giller, and John Hackey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In another group, still allegiant to the gangsters, were men such as Shorty,
+Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, and Larry. Charles Davis was prominently in the
+gangster group. A fourth group was composed of Sundry Buyers, Nancy, and Tony
+the Greek. This group was distinctly neutral. And, finally, unaffiliated, quite
+by himself, stood Mulligan Jacobs&mdash;listening, I fancy, to far echoes of
+ancient wrongs, and feeling, I doubt not, the bite of the iron-hot hooks in his
+brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you going to do with us, sir?&rdquo; Isaac Chantz demanded of
+me, in defiance to the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew&rsquo;s voice.
+Chantz&rsquo;s partisans drew closer to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jail you,&rdquo; I answered from above. &ldquo;And it shall go as hard
+with all of you as I can make it hard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe you will an&rsquo; maybe you won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; the Jew retorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut up, Chantz!&rdquo; Bert Rhine commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you&rsquo;ll get yours, you wop,&rdquo; Chantz snarled, &ldquo;if I
+have to do it myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have been
+priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in observing the
+moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to glimpse the tragedy
+into which it was culminating.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bombini!&rdquo; Bert Rhine said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice was imperative. It was the order of a master to the dog at heel.
+Bombini responded. He drew his knife and started to advance upon the Jew. But a
+deep rumbling, animal-like in its <i>sound</i> and menace, arose in the throats
+of those about the Jew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader, whose
+face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a good deed&mdash;do it, Bombini,&rdquo; Charles Davis
+encouraged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shut your face, Davis!&rdquo; came out from Bert Rhine&rsquo;s bandages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into Bombini&rsquo;s
+side, then covered the men about the Jew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian. He was caught
+between the mill-stones, &ldquo;Bombini, stick that Jew,&rdquo; Bert Rhine
+commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either side, Kid
+Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I cannot see him,&rdquo; Bert Rhine went on; &ldquo;but by God I will
+see him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the bandages.
+The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement. I saw the horror of
+his face, but the description of it is beyond the limits of any English I
+possess. I was aware that Margaret, at my shoulder, gasped and shuddered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bombini!&mdash;stick him,&rdquo; the gangster repeated. &ldquo;And stick
+any man that raises a yap. Murphy! See that Bombini does his work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Murphy&rsquo;s knife was out and at the bravo&rsquo;s back. Kid Twist covered
+the Jew&rsquo;s group with his revolver. And the three advanced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed from dream
+to action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bombini!&rdquo; I said sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused and looked up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand where you are,&rdquo; I ordered, &ldquo;till I do some
+talking.&mdash;Chantz! Make no mistake. Rhine is boss for&rsquo;ard. You take
+his orders . . . until we get into Valparaiso; then you&rsquo;ll take your
+chances along with him in jail. In the meantime, what Rhine says goes. Get
+that, and get it straight. I am behind Rhine until the police come on
+board.&mdash;Bombini! do whatever Rhine tells you. I&rsquo;ll shoot the man who
+tries to stop you.&mdash;Deacon! Stand away from Chantz. Go over to the
+fife-rail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All hands knew the stream of lead my automatic rifle could throw, and Arthur
+Deacon knew it. He hesitated barely a moment, then obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Fitzgibbon!&mdash;Giller!&mdash;Hackey!&rdquo; I called in turn, and was
+obeyed. &ldquo;Fay!&rdquo; I called twice, ere the response came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Isaac Chantz stood alone, and Bombini now showed eagerness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chantz!&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you think it would be
+healthier to go over to the fife-rail and be good?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He debated the matter not many seconds, resheathed his knife, and complied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tang of power! I was minded to let literature get the better of me and read
+the rascals a lecture; but thank heaven I had sufficient proportion and balance
+to refrain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rhine!&rdquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned his corroded face up to me and blinked in an effort to see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As long as Chantz takes your orders, leave him alone. We&rsquo;ll need
+every hand to work the ship in. As for yourself, send Murphy aft in half an
+hour and I&rsquo;ll give him the best the medicine-chest affords. That is all.
+Go for&rsquo;ard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they shambled away, beaten and dispirited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that man&mdash;his face&mdash;what happened to him?&rdquo; Margaret
+asked of me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sad it is to end love with lies. Sadder still is it to begin love with lies. I
+had tried to hide this one happening from Margaret, and I had failed. It could
+no longer be hidden save by lying; and so I told her the truth, told her how
+and why the gangster had had his face dashed with sulphuric acid by the old
+steward who knew white men and their ways.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is little more to write. The mutiny of the <i>Elsinore</i> is over. The
+divided crew is ruled by the gangsters, who are as intent on getting their
+leader into port as I am intent on getting all of them into jail. The first lap
+of the voyage of the <i>Elsinore</i> draws to a close. Two days, at most, with
+our present sailing, will bring us into Valparaiso. And then, as beginning a
+new voyage, the <i>Elsinore</i> will depart for Seattle.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing more remains for me to write, and then this strange log of a strange
+cruise will be complete. It happened only last night. I am yet fresh from it,
+and athrill with it and with the promise of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Margaret and I spent the last hour of the second dog-watch together at the
+break of the poop. It was good again to feel the <i>Elsinore</i> yielding to
+the wind-pressure on her canvas, to feel her again slipping and sliding through
+the water in an easy sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hidden by the darkness, clasped in each other&rsquo;s arms, we talked love and
+love plans. Nor am I shamed to confess that I was all for immediacy. Once in
+Valparaiso, I contended, we would fit out the <i>Elsinore</i> with fresh crew
+and officers and send her on her way. As for us, steamers and rapid travelling
+would fetch us quickly home. Furthermore, Valparaiso being a place where such
+things as licences and ministers obtained, we would be married ere we caught
+the fast steamers for home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Margaret was obdurate. The Wests had always stood by their ships, she
+urged; had always brought their ships in to the ports intended or had gone down
+with their ships in the effort. The <i>Elsinore</i> had cleared from Baltimore
+for Seattle with the Wests in the high place. The <i>Elsinore</i> would
+re-equip with officers and men in Valparaiso, and the <i>Elsinore</i> would
+arrive in Seattle with a West still on board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think, dear heart,&rdquo; I objected. &ldquo;The voyage will require
+months. Remember what Henley has said: &lsquo;Every kiss we take or give leaves
+us less of life to live.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pressed her lips to mine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We kiss,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I was stupid.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+* * * * *
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, the weary, weary months,&rdquo; I complained. &ldquo;You dear
+silly,&rdquo; she gurgled. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I understand only that it is many a thousand miles from Valparaiso to
+Seattle,&rdquo; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; she challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a fool,&rdquo; I admitted. &ldquo;I am aware of only one thing: I
+want you. I want you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a dear, but you are very, very stupid,&rdquo; she said, and as
+she spoke she caught my hand and pressed the palm of it against her cheek.
+&ldquo;What do you feel?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hot cheeks&mdash;cheeks most hot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am blushing for what your stupidity compels me to say,&rdquo; she
+explained. &ldquo;You have already said that such things as licences and
+ministers obtain in Valparaiso . . . and . . . and, well . . . &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean . . . ?&rdquo; I stammered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just that,&rdquo; she confirmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The honeymoon shall be on the <i>Elsinore</i> from Valparaiso all the
+way to Seattle?&rdquo; I rattled on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The many thousands of miles, the weary, weary months,&rdquo; she teased
+in my own intonations, until I stifled her teasing with my lips.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Mutiny of the Elsinore, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Mutiny of the Elsinore
+
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 10, 2007  [eBook #2415]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE***
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1915 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org; proofed by Rab Hughes.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE
+
+
+BY
+JACK LONDON
+
+MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
+49 RUPERT STREET
+LONDON, W.
+
+_Published 1915_
+
+_Copyright in the United States of America by_ JACK LONDON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+From the first the voyage was going wrong.  Routed out of my hotel on a
+bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end
+precisely on time.  At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me down the
+bay and put me on board the _Elsinore_, and with growing irritation I sat
+frozen inside my taxicab and waited.  On the seat, outside, the driver
+and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than
+mine.  And there was no tug.
+
+Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted
+upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under
+the fur robe.  But he would not settle down.  Continually he whimpered
+and clawed and struggled to get out.  And, once out and bitten by the
+cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back.
+
+His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled
+nerves.  In the first place I was uninterested in the brute.  He meant
+nothing to me.  I did not know him.  Time and again, as I drearily
+waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver.  Once, when two
+little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters--went by, my hand
+reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and
+present them with the puling little wretch.
+
+A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel
+the night before, by express from New York.  It was Galbraith's way.  Yet
+he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit . . .
+or flowers, even.  But no; his affectionate inspiration had to take the
+form of a yelping, yapping two months' old puppy.  And with the advent of
+the terrier the trouble had begun.  The hotel clerk judged me a criminal
+before the act I had not even had time to meditate.  And then Wada, on
+his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to
+smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house detective.
+Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical
+Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the
+hotel clerk had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was
+only what he had expected of me.
+
+Damn the dog, anyway!  And damn Galbraith too!  And as I froze on in the
+cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak
+that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
+
+By ten o'clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-case,
+which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the wharfinger.  It
+belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to the chauffeur
+how to find some other pier from which, at some indeterminate time, I
+should be taken aboard the _Elsinore_ by some other tug.  This served to
+increase my irritation.  Why should I not have been informed as well as
+the pilot?
+
+An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the new
+pier, the pilot arrived.  Anything more unlike a pilot I could not have
+imagined.  Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the sea, but
+a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of successful
+business man one meets in all the clubs.  He introduced himself
+immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with Possum and
+the baggage.  That some change had been made in the arrangements by
+Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug would come along
+any time.
+
+And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait
+and freeze for four mortal hours.  During this time I fully made up my
+mind that I was not going to like this Captain West.  Although I had
+never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the
+least, cavalier.  When the _Elsinore_ lay in Erie Basin, just arrived
+from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over from New York
+to inspect what was to be my home for many months.  I had been delighted
+with the ship and the cabin accommodation.  Even the stateroom selected
+for me was satisfactory and far more spacious than I had expected.  But
+when I peeped into the captain's room I was amazed at its comfort.  When
+I say that it opened directly into a bath-room, and that, among other
+things, it was furnished with a big brass bed such as one would never
+suspect to find at sea, I have said enough.
+
+Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed should
+be mine.  When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain they seemed
+non-committal and uncomfortable.  "I don't know in the least what it is
+worth," I said.  "And I don't care.  Whether it costs one hundred and
+fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have those quarters."
+
+Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and
+scarcely thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement.  "Then
+he is the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn't," I asserted
+confidently.  "Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners regularly
+sell their quarters."
+
+"But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner," Mr. Harrison
+observed gently.
+
+"Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month," I retorted.  "Why,
+heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary."
+
+"We'll try," said Mr. Gray, "but we warn you not to place too much
+dependence on our efforts.  Captain West is in Searsport at the present
+time, and we will write him to-day."
+
+To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform me
+that Captain West had declined my offer.  "Did you offer him up to a
+thousand?" I demanded.  "What did he say?"
+
+"He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked," Mr. Gray
+replied.
+
+A day later I received a letter from Captain West.  The writing and the
+wording were old-fashioned and formal.  He regretted not having yet met
+me, and assured me that he would see personally that my quarters were
+made comfortable.  For that matter he had already dispatched orders to
+Mr. Pike, the first mate of the _Elsinore_, to knock out the partition
+between my state-room and the spare state-room adjoining.  Further--and
+here is where my dislike for Captain West began--he informed me that if,
+when once well at sea, I should find myself dissatisfied, he would
+gladly, in that case, exchange quarters with me.
+
+Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could ever
+persuade me to occupy Captain West's brass bed.  And it was this Captain
+Nathaniel West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me freezing on
+pier-ends through four miserable hours.  The less I saw of him on the
+voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a little tickle of
+pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I had dispatched on
+board from New York.  Thank the Lord, I did not depend on sea captains
+for entertainment.
+
+I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and while
+the tug's sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by the
+pilot to an introduction with Captain West.  At the first glimpse I knew
+that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot.  I had seen
+the best of the breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more
+resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced
+skippers I had read about in books.  By his side stood a woman, of whom
+little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of colour in
+the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was well-nigh buried.
+
+"My God!--his wife!" I darted in a whisper at the pilot.  "Going along
+with him? . . . "
+
+I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage, that
+the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the
+_Elsinore_ taking his wife on the voyage.  And Mr. Harrison had smiled
+and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.
+
+"It's his daughter," the pilot replied under his breath.  "Come to see
+him off, I fancy.  His wife died over a year ago.  They say that is what
+sent him back to sea.  He'd retired, you know."
+
+Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
+touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved
+to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality.  Long,
+lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as
+cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as
+the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid.  And
+then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and
+controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of
+the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful
+warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-
+set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds
+sound into speech.
+
+So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that I
+was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of
+untold beneficence and wisdom.  Yet he uttered most commonplace regrets
+at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me.  It was low
+and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as a bell and touched with a faint
+reminiscent twang of old New England.
+
+"And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay," he concluded my
+introduction to his daughter.  "Margaret, this is Mr. Pathurst."
+
+Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and I
+found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and gravely
+upon me.  It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching gaze.  It
+was not that it was challenging, but that it was so insolently business-
+like.  It was much in the very way one would look at a new coachman he
+was about to engage.  I did not know then that she was to go on the
+voyage, and that her curiosity about the man who was to be a
+fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only natural.  Immediately
+she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes smiled as she
+spoke.
+
+As we moved on to enter the tug's cabin I heard Possum's shivering
+whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the
+creature in out of the cold.  I found him hovering about my luggage,
+wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my little automatic
+rifle.  I was startled by the mountain of luggage around which mine was
+no more than a fringe.  Ship's stores, was my first thought, until I
+noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and bundles of
+all sorts.  The initials on what looked suspiciously like a woman's hat
+trunk caught my eye--"M.W."  Yet Captain West's first name was Nathaniel.
+On closer investigation I did find several "N.W's." but everywhere I
+could see "M.W's."  Then I remembered that he had called her Margaret.
+
+I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold
+deck biting my lips with vexation.  I had so expressly stipulated with
+the agents that no captain's wife was to come along.  The last thing
+under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman.  But I
+had never thought about a captain's daughter.  For two cents I was ready
+to throw the voyage over and return on the tug to Baltimore.
+
+By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I
+noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid being
+struck by the spring and vitality of her walk.  Her face, despite its
+firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was belied by the
+robustness of her body.  At least, one would argue that her body must be
+robust from her fashion of movement of it, though little could one divine
+the lines of it under the shapelessness of the furs.
+
+I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the mountain
+of luggage.  A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and I was
+staring at it when she spoke at my shoulder.
+
+"That's what really caused the delay," she said.
+
+"What is it?" I asked incuriously.
+
+"Why, the _Elsinore's_ piano, all renovated.  When I made up my mind to
+come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike--he's the mate, you know.  He did his best.
+It was the fault of the piano house.  And while we waited to-day I gave
+them a piece of my mind they'll not forget in a hurry."
+
+She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into the
+luggage as if in search of some particular piece.  Having satisfied
+herself, she was starting back, when she paused and said:
+
+"Won't you come into the cabin where it's warm?  We won't be there for
+half an hour."
+
+"When did you decide to make this voyage?" I demanded abruptly.
+
+So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment
+caught all my disgruntlement and disgust.
+
+"Two days ago," she answered.  "Why?"
+
+Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could speak
+she went on:
+
+"Now you're not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst.  I
+probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we're all going
+to be comfortable and happy.  You can't bother me, and I promise you I
+won't bother you.  I've sailed with passengers before, and I've learned
+to put up with more than they ever proved they were able to put up with.
+So there.  Let us start right, and it won't be any trouble to keep on
+going right.  I know what is the matter with you.  You think you'll be
+called upon to entertain me.  Please know that I do not need
+entertainment.  I never saw the longest voyage that was too long, and I
+always arrive at the end with too many things not done for the passage
+ever to have been tedious, and . . . I don't play _Chopsticks_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The _Elsinore_, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when
+we came alongside.  I knew too little about ships to be capable of
+admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration.  I was
+still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole thing and
+return on the tug.  From all of which it must not be taken that I am a
+vacillating type of man.  On the contrary.
+
+The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I been
+keen for the voyage.  Practically the reason I was taking it was because
+there was nothing else I was keen on.  For some time now life had lost
+its savour.  I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored.  But the zest had
+gone out of things.  I had lost taste for my fellow-men and all their
+foolish, little, serious endeavours.  For a far longer period I had been
+dissatisfied with women.  I had endured them, but I had been too analytic
+of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost ferocious devotion
+to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them.  And I had come to be
+oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of art--a pompous
+legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not only its devotees
+but its practitioners.
+
+In short, I was embarking on the _Elsinore_ because it was easier to than
+not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy.  That was
+the curse of the condition into which I had fallen.  That was why, as I
+stepped upon the deck of the _Elsinore_, I was half of a mind to tell
+them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain West and his
+daughter good-day.
+
+I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile Miss
+West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the cabin, and
+the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
+
+Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie
+Basin.  He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be painful,
+but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call orders to
+half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled up from
+somewhere in the waist of the ship.  Mr. Pike had been drinking.  That
+was patent.  His face was puffed and discoloured, and his large gray eyes
+were bitter and bloodshot.
+
+I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and
+chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few
+words that would put a stop to it.  As for the half-dozen men who were
+now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike any concept
+I had ever entertained of sailors.  Certainly, on the liners, I had
+observed nothing that resembled them.
+
+One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of
+remarkable Italian eyes.  But he was a dwarf.  So short was he that he
+was all sea-boots and sou'wester.  And yet he was not entirely Italian.
+So certain was I that I asked the mate, who answered morosely:
+
+"Him?  Shorty?  He's a dago half-breed.  The other half's Jap or Malay."
+
+One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought he
+had been recently injured.  His face was stolid and ox-like, and as he
+shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he paused every several
+steps to place both hands on his abdomen and execute a queer, pressing,
+lifting movement.  Months were to pass, in which I saw him do this
+thousands of times, ere I learned that there was nothing the matter with
+him and that his action was purely a habit.  His face reminded me of the
+Man with the Hoe, save that it was unthinkably and abysmally stupider.
+And his name, as I was to learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers.  And he
+was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship _Elsinore_--rated one of the
+finest sailing-ships afloat!
+
+Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw
+only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the
+slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like.  He had come off a
+training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage to sea.
+His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements, and he wore
+sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace.  In fact, as I was to
+learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming creature fore and aft.
+
+The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any moment,
+the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy.  Those already on
+board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped themselves in New York
+without the mediation of boarding-house masters.  And what the crew
+itself would be like God alone could tell--so said the mate.  Shorty, the
+Japanese (or Malay) and Italian half-caste, the mate told me, was an able
+seaman, though he had come out of steam and this was his first sailing
+voyage.
+
+"Ordinary seamen!" Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question.  "We don't
+carry Landsmen!--forget it!  Every clodhopper an' cow-walloper these days
+is an able seaman.  That's the way they rank and are paid.  The merchant
+service is all shot to hell.  There ain't no more sailors.  They all died
+years ago, before you were born even."
+
+I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate's breath.  Yet he did not
+stagger nor show any signs of intoxication.  Not until afterward was I to
+know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was where the
+liquor gave him away.
+
+"It'd a-ben a grace had I died years ago," he said, "rather than to a-
+lived to see sailors an' ships pass away from the sea."
+
+"But I understand the _Elsinore_ is considered one of the finest," I
+urged.
+
+"So she is . . . to-day.  But what is she?--a damned cargo-carrier.  She
+ain't built for sailin', an' if she was there ain't no sailors left to
+sail her.  Lord!  Lord!  The old clippers!  When I think of 'em!--_The
+Gamecock_, _Shootin' Star_, _Flyin' Fish_, _Witch o' the Wave_,
+_Staghound_, _Harvey Birch_, _Canvas-back_, _Fleetwing_, _Sea Serpent_,
+_Northern Light_!  An' when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
+that used to load at Hong Kong an' race the Eastern Passages.  A fine
+sight!  A fine sight!"
+
+I was interested.  Here was a man, a live man.  I was in no hurry to go
+into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I paced up
+and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike.  Huge he was in all conscience,
+broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the profound stoop of his
+shoulders, fully six feet in height.
+
+"You are a splendid figure of a man," I complimented.
+
+"I was, I was," he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey
+strong on the air.
+
+I stole a look at his gnarled hands.  Any finger would have made three of
+mine.  His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
+
+"How much do you weigh?" I asked.
+
+"Two hundred an' ten.  But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales
+close to two-forty."
+
+"And the _Elsinore_ can't sail," I said, returning to the subject which
+had roused him.
+
+"I'll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month's wages,
+she won't make it around in a hundred an' fifty days," he answered.  "Yet
+I've come round in the old _Flyin' Cloud_ in eighty-nine days--eighty-nine
+days, sir, from Sandy Hook to 'Frisco.  Sixty men for'ard that _was_ men,
+an' eight boys, an' drive! drive! drive!  Three hundred an' seventy-four
+miles for a day's run under t'gallantsails, an' in the squalls eighteen
+knots o' line not enough to time her.  Eighty-nine days--never beat, an'
+tied once by the old _Andrew Jackson_ nine years afterwards.  Them was
+the days!"
+
+"When did the _Andrew Jackson_ tie her?" I asked, because of the growing
+suspicion that he was "having" me.
+
+"In 1860," was his prompt reply.
+
+"And you sailed in the _Flying Cloud_ nine years before that, and this is
+1913--why, that was sixty-two years ago," I charged.
+
+"And I was seven years old," he chuckled.  "My mother was stewardess on
+the _Flyin' Cloud_.  I was born at sea.  I was boy when I was twelve, on
+the _Herald o' the Morn_, when she made around in ninety-nine days--half
+the crew in irons most o' the time, five men lost from aloft off the
+Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square off, knuckle-dusters
+an' belayin'-pins flyin', three men shot by the officers in one day, the
+second mate killed dead an' no one to know who done it, an' drive! drive!
+drive! ninety-nine days from land to land, a run of seventeen thousand
+miles, an' east to west around Cape Stiff!"
+
+"But that would make you sixty-nine years old," I insisted.
+
+"Which I am," he retorted proudly, "an' a better man at that than the
+scrubby younglings of these days.  A generation of 'em would die under
+the things I've been through.  Did you ever hear of the _Sunny
+South_?--she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an' changed her name
+to _Emanuela_?"
+
+"And you've sailed the Middle Passage!" I cried, recollecting the old
+phrase.
+
+"I was on the _Emanuela_ that day in Mozambique Channel when the _Brisk_
+caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks.  Only she wouldn't a-
+caught us except for her having steam."
+
+I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the past,
+and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old man-killing
+and man-driving days.  He was too real to be true, and yet, as I studied
+his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge feet, I was convinced
+that his years were as he asserted.  He spoke of a Captain Sonurs.
+
+"He was a great captain," he was saying.  "An' in the two years I sailed
+mate with him there was never a port I didn't jump the ship goin' in an'
+stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed again."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"The men, on account of the men swearin' blood an' vengeance and warrants
+against me because of my ways of teachin' them to be sailors.  Why, the
+times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid for me--and yet it was
+my work that made the ship make money."
+
+He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed
+knuckles I understood the nature of his work.
+
+"But all that's stopped now," he lamented.  "A sailor's a gentleman these
+days.  You can't raise your voice or your hand to them."
+
+At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the second
+mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
+
+"The tug's in sight with the crew, sir," he announced.
+
+The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, "Come on down, Mr.
+Mellaire, and meet our passenger."
+
+I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire came
+down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction.  He was
+courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and unmistakably from
+south of Mason and Dixon.
+
+"A Southerner," I said.
+
+"Georgia, sir."  He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow and
+smile.
+
+His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was
+the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face.  It was a gash.  There
+is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth
+that uttered gracious things so graciously.  Involuntarily I glanced at
+his hands.  Like the mate's, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and
+malformed.  Back into his blue eyes I looked.  On the surface of them was
+a film of light, a gloss of gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind
+that gloss I knew resided neither sincerity nor mercy.  Behind that gloss
+was something cold and terrible, that lurked and waited and
+watched--something catlike, something inimical and deadly.  Behind that
+gloss of soft light and of social sparkle was the live, fearful thing
+that had shaped that mouth into the gash it was.  What I sensed behind in
+those eyes chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.
+
+As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and exchanged
+amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest or
+jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying upon
+him.  Frankly I was afraid of the thing ambushed behind there in the
+skull of Mr. Mellaire.  One so as a matter of course identifies form and
+feature with the spirit within.  But I could not do this with the second
+mate.  His face and form and manner and suave ease were one thing, inside
+which he, an entirely different thing, lay hid.
+
+I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask for
+instructions.  I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside.  Mr. Pike
+looked at me quickly and said:
+
+"Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst."
+
+He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and
+started for'ard.  I stood and waited for Mr. Pike's communication, which
+he did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out of ear-
+shot.  Then he leaned closely to me and said:
+
+"Don't mention that little matter of my age to anybody.  Each year I sign
+on I sign my age one year younger.  I am fifty-four, now, on the
+articles."
+
+"And you don't look a day older," I answered lightly, though I meant it
+in all sincerity.
+
+"And I don't feel it.  I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the
+younglings.  And don't let my age get to anybody's ears, Mr. Pathurst.
+Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the seventy mark.
+And owners neither.  I've had my hopes for this ship, and I'd a-got her,
+I think, except for the old man decidin' to go to sea again.  As if he
+needed the money!  The old skinflint!"
+
+"Is he well off?" I inquired.
+
+"Well off!  If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken
+ranch in California and live like a fighting cock--yes, if I had a
+fiftieth of what he's got salted away.  Why, he owns more stock in all
+the Blackwood ships . . . and they've always been lucky and always earned
+money.  I'm getting old, and it's about time I got a command.  But no;
+the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to sea again just as the
+berth's ripe for me to fall into."
+
+Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst?  You won't mention about my age?"
+
+"No, certainly not, Mr. Pike," I said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Quite chilled through, I was immediately struck by the warm comfort of
+the cabin.  All the connecting doors were open, making what I might call
+a large suite of rooms or a whale house.  The main-deck entrance, on the
+port side, was into a wide, well-carpeted hallway.  Into this hallway,
+from the port side, opened five rooms: first, on entering, the mate's;
+next, the two state-rooms which had been knocked into one for me; then
+the steward's room; and, adjoining his, completing the row, a state-room
+which was used for the slop-chest.
+
+Across the hall was a region with which I was not yet acquainted, though
+I knew it contained the dining-room, the bath-rooms, the cabin proper,
+which was in truth a spacious living-room, the captain's quarters, and,
+undoubtedly, Miss West's quarters.  I could hear her humming some air as
+she bustled about with her unpacking.  The steward's pantry, separated by
+crosshalls and by the stairway leading into the chart-room above on the
+poop, was placed strategically in the centre of all its operations.  Thus,
+on the starboard side of it were the state-rooms of the captain and Miss
+West, for'ard of it were the dining-room and main cabin; while on the
+port side of it was the row of rooms I have described, two of which were
+mine.
+
+I ventured down the hall toward the stern, and found it opened into the
+stern of the _Elsinore_, forming a single large apartment at least thirty-
+five feet from side to side and fifteen to eighteen feet in depth,
+curved, of course, to the lines of the ship's stern.  This seemed a store-
+room.  I noted wash-tubs, bolts of canvas, many lockers, hams and bacon
+hanging, a step-ladder that led up through a small hatch to the poop,
+and, in the floor, another hatch.
+
+I spoke to the steward, an old Chinese, smooth-faced and brisk of
+movement, whose name I never learned, but whose age on the articles was
+fifty-six.
+
+"What is down there?" I asked, pointing to the hatch in the floor.
+
+"Him lazarette," he answered.
+
+"And who eats there?" I indicated a table with two stationary sea-chairs.
+
+"Him second table.  Second mate and carpenter him eat that table."
+
+When I had finished giving instructions to Wada for the arranging of my
+things I looked at my watch.  It was early yet, only several minutes
+after three so I went on deck again to witness the arrival of the crew.
+
+The actual coming on board from the tug I had missed, but for'ard of the
+amidship house I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone into the
+forecastle.  These were the worse for liquor, and a more wretched,
+miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum.  Their
+clothes were rags.  Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty.  I won't
+say they were villainous.  They were merely filthy and vile.  They were
+vile of appearance, of speech, and action.
+
+"Come!  Come!  Get your dunnage into the fo'c's'le!"
+
+Mr. Pike uttered these words sharply from the bridge above.  A light and
+graceful bridge of steel rods and planking ran the full length of the
+_Elsinore_, starting from the poop, crossing the amidship house and the
+forecastle, and connecting with the forecastle-head at the very bow of
+the ship.
+
+At the mate's command the men reeled about and glowered up at him, one or
+two starting clumsily to obey.  The others ceased their drunken
+yammerings and regarded the mate sullenly.  One of them, with a face
+mashed by some mad god in the making, and who was afterwards to be known
+by me as Larry, burst into a guffaw, and spat insolently on the deck.
+Then, with utmost deliberation, he turned to his fellows and demanded
+loudly and huskily:
+
+"Who in hell's the old stiff, anyways?"
+
+I saw Mr. Pike's huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and I
+noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the
+bridge-railing.  Beyond that he controlled himself.
+
+"Go on, you," he said.  "I'll have nothing out of you.  Get into the
+fo'c's'le."
+
+And then, to my surprise, he turned and walked aft along the bridge to
+where the tug was casting off its lines.  So this was all his high and
+mighty talk of kill and drive, I thought.  Not until afterwards did I
+recollect, as I turned aft down the deck, that I saw Captain West leaning
+on the rail at the break of the poop and gazing for'ard.
+
+The tug's lines were being cast off, and I was interested in watching the
+manoeuvre until she had backed clear of the ship, at which moment, from
+for'ard, arose a queer babel of howling and yelping, as numbers of
+drunken voices cried out that a man was overboard.  The second mate
+sprang down the poop-ladder and darted past me along the deck.  The mate,
+still on the slender, white-painted bridge, that seemed no more than a
+spider thread, surprised me by the activity with which he dashed along
+the bridge to the 'midship house, leaped upon the canvas-covered long-
+boat, and swung outboard where he might see.  Before the men could
+clamber upon the rail the second mate was among them, and it was he who
+flung a coil of line overboard.
+
+What impressed me particularly was the mental and muscular superiority of
+these two officers.  Despite their age--the mate sixty-nine and the
+second mate at least fifty--their minds and their bodies had acted with
+the swiftness and accuracy of steel springs.  They were potent.  They
+were iron.  They were perceivers, willers, and doers.  They were as of
+another species compared with the sailors under them.  While the latter,
+witnesses of the happening and directly on the spot, had been crying out
+in befuddled helplessness, and with slow wits and slower bodies been
+climbing upon the rail, the second mate had descended the steep ladder
+from the poop, covered two hundred feet of deck, sprung upon the rail,
+grasped the instant need of the situation, and cast the coil of line into
+the water.
+
+And of the same nature and quality had been the actions of Mr. Pike.  He
+and Mr. Mellaire were masters over the wretched creatures of sailors by
+virtue of this remarkable difference of efficiency and will.  Truly, they
+were more widely differentiated from the men under them than were the men
+under them differentiated from Hottentots--ay, and from monkeys.
+
+I, too, by this time, was standing on the big hawser-bitts in a position
+to see a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming away from the
+ship.  He was a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some sort, and his face, in
+a clear glimpse I caught of it, was distorted by frenzy.  His black eyes
+were maniacal.  The line was so accurately flung by the second mate that
+it fell across the man's shoulders, and for several strokes his arms
+tangled in it ere he could swim clear.  This accomplished, he proceeded
+to scream some wild harangue and once, as he uptossed his arms for
+emphasis, I saw in his hand the blade of a long knife.
+
+Bells were jangling on the tug as it started to the rescue.  I stole a
+look up at Captain West.  He had walked to the port side of the poop,
+where, hands in pockets, he was glancing, now for'ard at the struggling
+man, now aft at the tug.  He gave no orders, betrayed no excitement, and
+appeared, I may well say, the most casual of spectators.
+
+The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his clothes.  I
+saw one bare arm, and then the other, appear.  In his struggles he
+sometimes sank beneath the surface, but always he emerged, flourishing
+the knife and screaming his addled harangue.  He even tried to escape the
+tug by diving and swimming underneath.
+
+I strolled for'ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over the
+rail of the _Elsinore_.  He was stark naked, covered with blood, and
+raving.  He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places.  From one
+wound in the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the pulse.  He was
+a loathsome, non-human thing.  I have seen a scared orang in a zoo, and
+for all the world this bestial-faced, mowing, gibbering thing reminded me
+of the orang.  The sailors surrounded him, laying hands on him,
+withstraining him, the while they guffawed and cheered.  Right and left
+the two mates shoved them away, and dragged the lunatic down the deck and
+into a room in the 'midship house.  I could not help marking the strength
+of Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire.  I had heard of the superhuman strength of
+madmen, but this particular madman was as a wisp of straw in their hands.
+Once into the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the struggling fool easily with
+one hand while he dispatched the second mate for marlin with which to tie
+the fellow's arms.
+
+"Bughouse," Mr. Pike grinned at me.  "I've seen some bughouse crews in my
+time, but this one's the limit."
+
+"What are you going to do?" I asked.  "The man will bleed to death."
+
+"And good riddance," he answered promptly.  "We'll have our hands full of
+him until we can lose him somehow.  When he gets easy I'll sew him up,
+that's all, if I have to ease him with a clout of the jaw."
+
+I glanced at the mate's huge paw and appreciated its anaesthetic
+qualities.  Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands
+still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky
+to the north-east.  More than the mates and the maniac, more than the
+drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in pockets,
+impress upon me that I was in a different world from any I had known.
+
+Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say that
+Miss West was serving tea in the cabin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The contrast, as I entered the cabin, was startling.  All contrasts
+aboard the _Elsinore_ promised to be startling.  Instead of the cold,
+hard deck my feet sank into soft carpet.  In place of the mean and narrow
+room, built of naked iron, where I had left the lunatic, I was in a
+spacious and beautiful apartment.  With the bawling of the men's voices
+still in my ears, and with the pictures of their drink-puffed and filthy
+faces still vivid under my eyelids, I found myself greeted by a delicate-
+faced, prettily-gowned woman who sat beside a lacquered oriental table on
+which rested an exquisite tea-service of Canton china.  All was repose
+and calm.  The steward, noiseless-footed, expressionless, was a shadow,
+scarcely noticed, that drifted into the room on some service and drifted
+out again.
+
+Not at once could I relax, and Miss West, serving my tea, laughed and
+said:
+
+"You look as if you had been seeing things.  The steward tells me a man
+has been overboard.  I fancy the cold water must have sobered him."
+
+I resented her unconcern.
+
+"The man is a lunatic," I said.  "This ship is no place for him.  He
+should be sent ashore to some hospital."
+
+"I am afraid, if we begin that, we'd have to send two-thirds of our
+complement ashore--one lump?
+
+"Yes, please," I answered.  "But the man has terribly wounded himself.  He
+is liable to bleed to death."
+
+She looked at me for a moment, her gray eyes serious and scrutinizing, as
+she passed me my cup; then laughter welled up in her eyes, and she shook
+her head reprovingly.
+
+"Now please don't begin the voyage by being shocked, Mr. Pathurst.  Such
+things are very ordinary occurrences.  You'll get used to them.  You must
+remember some queer creatures go down to the sea in ships.  The man is
+safe.  Trust Mr. Pike to attend to his wounds.  I've never sailed with
+Mr. Pike, but I've heard enough about him.  Mr. Pike is quite a surgeon.
+Last voyage, they say, he performed a successful amputation, and so
+elated was he that he turned his attention on the carpenter, who happened
+to be suffering from some sort of indigestion.  Mr. Pike was so convinced
+of the correctness of his diagnosis that he tried to bribe the carpenter
+into having his appendix removed."  She broke off to laugh heartily, then
+added: "They say he offered the poor man just pounds and pounds of
+tobacco to consent to the operation."
+
+"But is it safe . . . for the . . . the working of the ship," I urged,
+"to take such a lunatic along?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, as if not intending to reply, then said:
+
+"This incident is nothing.  There are always several lunatics or idiots
+in every ship's company.  And they always come aboard filled with whiskey
+and raving.  I remember, once, when we sailed from Seattle, a long time
+ago, one such madman.  He showed no signs of madness at all; just calmly
+seized two boarding-house runners and sprang overboard with them.  We
+sailed the same day, before the bodies were recovered."
+
+Again she shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What would you?  The sea is hard, Mr. Pathurst.  And for our sailors we
+get the worst type of men.  I sometimes wonder where they find them.  And
+we do our best with them, and somehow manage to make them help us carry
+on our work in the world.  But they are low . . . low."
+
+As I listened, and studied her face, contrasting her woman's sensitivity
+and her soft pretty dress with the brute faces and rags of the men I had
+noticed, I could not help being convinced intellectually of the rightness
+of her position.  Nevertheless, I was hurt sentimentally,--chiefly, I do
+believe, because of the very hardness and unconcern with which she
+enunciated her view.  It was because she was a woman, and so different
+from the sea-creatures, that I resented her having received such harsh
+education in the school of the sea.
+
+"I could not help remarking your father's--er, er _sang froid_ during the
+occurrence."  I ventured.
+
+"He never took his hands from his pockets!" she cried.
+
+Her eyes sparkled as I nodded confirmation.
+
+"I knew it!  It's his way.  I've seen it so often.  I remember when I was
+twelve years old--mother was alone--we were running into San Francisco.
+It was in the _Dixie_, a ship almost as big as this.  There was a strong
+fair wind blowing, and father did not take a tug.  We sailed right
+through the Golden Gate and up the San Francisco water-front.  There was
+a swift flood tide, too; and the men, both watches, were taking in sail
+as fast as they could.
+
+"Now the fault was the steamboat captain's.  He miscalculated our speed
+and tried to cross our bow.  Then came the collision, and the _Dixie's_
+bow cut through that steamboat, cabin and hull.  There were hundreds of
+passengers, men, women, and children.  Father never took his hands from
+his pockets.  He sent the mate for'ard to superintend rescuing the
+passengers, who were already climbing on to our bowsprit and forecastle-
+head, and in a voice no different from what he'd use to ask some one to
+pass the butter he told the second mate to set all sail.  And he told him
+which sails to begin with."
+
+"But why set more sails?" I interrupted.
+
+"Because he could see the situation.  Don't you see, the steamboat was
+cut wide open.  All that kept her from sinking instantly was the bow of
+the _Dixie_ jammed into her side.  By setting more sail and keeping
+before the wind, he continued to keep the bow of the _Dixie_ jammed.
+
+"I was terribly frightened.  People who had sprung or fallen overboard
+were drowning on each side of us, right in my sight, as we sailed along
+up the water-front.  But when I looked at father, there he was, just as I
+had always known him, hands in pockets, walking slowly up and down, now
+giving an order to the wheel--you see, he had to direct the _Dixie's_
+course through all the shipping--now watching the passengers swarming
+over our bow and along our deck, now looking ahead to see his way through
+the ships at anchor.  Sometimes he did glance at the poor, drowning ones,
+but he was not concerned with them.
+
+"Of course, there were numbers drowned, but by keeping his hands in his
+pockets and his head cool he saved hundreds of lives.  Not until the last
+person was off the steamboat--he sent men aboard to make sure--did he
+take off the press of sail.  And the steamboat sank at once."
+
+She ceased, and looked at me with shining eyes for approbation.
+
+"It was splendid," I acknowledged.  "I admire the quiet man of power,
+though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
+unearthly and beyond human.  I can't conceive of myself acting that way,
+and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor devil was in
+the water than all the rest of the onlookers put together."
+
+"Father suffers!" she defended loyally.  "Only he does not show it."
+
+I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug _Britannia_ in sight.
+She was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea.
+Strolling for'ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the forecastle
+by Sundry Buyers, for ever tenderly pressing his abdomen with his hands.
+Another man was helping Sundry Buyers at routing out the sailors.  I
+asked Mr. Pike who the man was.
+
+"Nancy--my bosun; ain't he a peach?" was the answer I got, and from the
+mate's manner of enunciation I was quite aware that "Nancy" had been used
+derisively.
+
+Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he had
+lived a very long time.  He was toothless and sad and weary of movement.
+His eyes were slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face was sickly
+yellow.  Narrow-shouldered, sunken-chested, with cheeks cavernously
+hollow, he looked like a man in the last stages of consumption.  Little
+life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even less life.  And these
+were bosuns!--bosuns of the fine American sailing-ship _Elsinore_!  Never
+had any illusion of mine taken a more distressing cropper.
+
+It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless, were
+afraid of the men they were supposed to boss.  And the men!  Dore could
+never have conjured a more delectable hell's broth.  For the first time I
+saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns for being afraid of
+them.  They did not walk.  They slouched and shambled, some even
+tottered, as from weakness or drink.
+
+But it was their faces.  I could not help remembering what Miss West had
+just told me--that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots in
+their crews.  But these looked as if they were all lunatic or
+feeble-minded.  And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage
+could have been obtained.  There was something wrong with all of them.
+Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without
+exception they were under-sized.  The several quite fairly large men I
+marked were vacant-faced.  One man, however, large and unmistakably
+Irish, was also unmistakably mad.  He was talking and muttering to
+himself as he came out.  A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his head
+on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue
+eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him
+O'Sullivan.  But O'Sullivan took no notice and muttered on.  On the heels
+of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth,
+followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed a
+marvel his flesh could hold his frame together.
+
+Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
+have ever beheld.  He was a twisted oaf of a man.  Face and body were
+twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture.  His was the
+face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun.  His large black eyes were
+bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed questioningly from
+face to face and to everything about.  They were so pitifully alert,
+those eyes, as if for ever astrain to catch the clue to some perplexing
+and threatening enigma.  Not until afterwards did I learn the cause of
+this.  He was stone deaf, having had his ear-drums destroyed in the
+boiler explosion which had wrecked the rest of him.
+
+I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the men
+from a distance.  His keen, Asiatic face, quick with intelligence, was a
+relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the
+forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter.  But there was something
+wrong with him, too.  He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his
+high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown.
+
+Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I
+watched him.  The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer, and
+it was plain that he was disgusted with the quality of cattle delivered.
+
+"Something the matter with the last mother's son of them," he growled.
+
+And still they came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly adjudged
+a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced and wrinkled,
+with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small, well-fleshed man, who
+seemed to my eye the most normal and least unintelligent specimen that
+had yet appeared.  But Mr. Pike's eye was better trained than mine.
+
+"What's the matter with _you_?" he snarled at the man.
+
+"Nothing, sir," the fellow answered, stopping immediately.
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+Mr. Pike never spoke to a sailor save with a snarl.
+
+"Charles Davis, sir."
+
+"What are you limping about?"
+
+"I ain't limpin', sir," the man answered respectfully, and, at a nod of
+dismissal from the mate, marched off jauntily along the deck with a
+heodlum swing to the shoulders.
+
+"He's a sailor all right," the mate grumbled; "but I'll bet you a pound
+of tobacco or a month's wages there's something wrong with him."
+
+The forecastle now seemed empty, but the mate turned on the bosuns with
+his customary snarl.
+
+"What in hell are you doing?  Sleeping?  Think this is a rest cure?  Get
+in there an' rustle 'em out!"
+
+Sundry Buyers pressed his abdomen gingerly and hesitated, while Nancy,
+his face one dogged, long-suffering bleakness, reluctantly entered the
+forecastle.  Then, from inside, we heard oaths, vile and filthy, urgings
+and expostulations on the part of Nancy, meekly and pleadingly uttered.
+
+I noted the grim and savage look that came on Mr. Pike's face, and was
+prepared for I knew not what awful monstrosities to emerge from the
+forecastle.  Instead, to my surprise, came three fellows who were
+strikingly superior to the ruck that had preceded them.  I looked to see
+the mate's face soften to some sort of approval.  On the contrary, his
+blue eyes contracted to narrow slits, the snarl of his voice was
+communicated to his lips, so that he seemed like a dog about to bite.
+
+But the three fellows.  They were small men, all; and young men, anywhere
+between twenty-five and thirty.  Though roughly dressed, they were well
+dressed, and under their clothes their bodily movements showed physical
+well-being.  Their faces were keen cut, intelligent.  And though I felt
+there was something queer about them, I could not divine what it was.
+
+Here were no ill-fed, whiskey-poisoned men, such as the rest of the
+sailors, who, having drunk up their last pay-days, had starved ashore
+until they had received and drunk up their advance money for the present
+voyage.  These three, on the other hand were supple and vigorous.  Their
+movements were spontaneously quick and accurate.  Perhaps it was the way
+they looked at me, with incurious yet calculating eyes that nothing
+escaped.  They seemed so worldly wise, so indifferent, so sure of
+themselves.  I was confident they were not sailors.  Yet, as
+shore-dwellers, I could not place them.  They were a type I had never
+encountered.  Possibly I can give a better idea of them by describing
+what occurred.
+
+As they passed before us they favoured Mr. Pike with the same
+indifferent, keen glances they gave me.
+
+"What's your name--you?" Mr. Pike barked at the first of the trio,
+evidently a hybrid Irish-Jew.  Jewish his nose unmistakably was.  Equally
+unmistakable was the Irish of his eyes, and jaw, and upper lip.
+
+The three had immediately stopped, and, though they did not look directly
+at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference.  Another
+of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic, Babylonish
+and Latin strains, gave a warning signal.  Oh, nothing so crass as a wink
+or a nod.  I almost doubted that I had intercepted it, and yet I knew he
+had communicated a warning to his fellows.  More a shade of expression
+that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of sudden light--or
+whatever it was, it carried the message.
+
+"Murphy," the other answered the mate.
+
+"Sir!" Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Murphy shrugged his shoulders in token that he did not understand.  It
+was the poise of the man, of the three of them, the cool poise that
+impressed me.
+
+"When you address any officer on this ship you'll say 'sir,'" Mr. Pike
+explained, his voice as harsh as his face was forbidding.  "Did you get
+_that_?"
+
+"Yes . . . sir," Murphy drawled with deliberate slowness.  "I gotcha."
+
+"Sir!" Mr. Pike roared.
+
+"Sir," Murphy answered, so softly and carelessly that it irritated the
+mate to further bullyragging.
+
+"Well, Murphy's too long," he announced.  "Nosey'll do you aboard this
+craft.  Got _that_?"
+
+"I gotcha . . . sir," came the reply, insolent in its very softness and
+unconcern.  "Nosey Murphy goes . . . sir."
+
+And then he laughed--the three of them laughed, if laughter it might be
+called that was laughter without sound or facial movement.  The eyes
+alone laughed, mirthlessly and cold-bloodedly.
+
+Certainly Mr. Pike was not enjoying himself with these baffling
+personalities.  He turned upon the leader, the one who had given the
+warning and who looked the admixture of all that was Mediterranean and
+Semitic.
+
+"What's _your_ name?"
+
+"Bert Rhine . . . sir," was the reply, in tones as soft and careless and
+silkily irritating as the other's.
+
+"And _you_?"--this to the remaining one, the youngest of the trio, a dark-
+eyed, olive-skinned fellow with a face most striking in its cameo-like
+beauty.  American-born, I placed him, of immigrants from Southern
+Italy--from Naples, or even Sicily.
+
+"Twist . . . sir," he answered, precisely in the same manner as the
+others.
+
+"Too long," the mate sneered.  "The Kid'll do you.  Got _that_?"
+
+"I gotcha . . . sir.  Kid Twist'll do me . . . sir."
+
+"Kid'll do!"
+
+"Kid . . . sir."
+
+And the three laughed their silent, mirthless laugh.  By this time Mr.
+Pike was beside himself with a rage that could find no excuse for action.
+
+"Now I'm going to tell you something, the bunch of you, for the good of
+your health."  The mate's voice grated with the rage he was suppressing.
+"I know your kind.  You're dirt.  D'ye get _that_?  You're dirt.  And on
+this ship you'll be treated as dirt.  You'll do your work like men, or
+I'll know the reason why.  The first time one of you bats an eye, or even
+looks like batting an eye, he gets his.  D'ye get that?  Now get out.  Get
+along for'ard to the windlass."
+
+Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved
+aft.
+
+"What do you make of them?" I queried.
+
+"The limit," he grunted.  "I know their kidney.  They've done time, the
+three of them.  They're just plain sweepings of hell--"
+
+Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on
+Number Two hatch.  Sprawled out on the hatch were five or six men, among
+them Larry, the tatterdemalion who had called him "old stiff" earlier in
+the afternoon.  That Larry had not obeyed orders was patent, for he was
+sitting with his back propped against his sea-bag, which ought to have
+been in the forecastle.  Also, he and the group with him ought to have
+been for'ard manning the windlass.
+
+The mate stepped upon the hatch and towered over the man.
+
+"Get up," he ordered.
+
+Larry made an effort, groaned, and failed to get up.
+
+"I can't," he said.
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"I can't, sir.  I was drunk last night an' slept in Jefferson Market.  An'
+this mornin' I was froze tight, sir.  They had to pry me loose."
+
+"Stiff with the cold you were, eh?" the mate grinned.
+
+"It's well ye might say it, sir," Larry answered.
+
+"And you feel like an old stiff, eh?"
+
+Larry blinked with the troubled, querulous eyes of a monkey.  He was
+beginning to apprehend he knew not what, and he knew that bending over
+him was a man-master.
+
+"Well, I'll just be showin' you what an old stiff feels like, anyways."
+Mr. Pike mimicked the other's brogue.
+
+And now I shall tell what I saw happen.  Please remember what I have said
+of the huge paws of Mr. Pike, the fingers much longer than mine and twice
+as thick, the wrists massive-boned, the arm-bones and the shoulder-bones
+of the same massive order.  With one flip of his right hand, with what I
+might call an open-handed, lifting, upward slap, save that it was the
+ends of the fingers only that touched Larry's face, he lifted Larry into
+the air, sprawling him backward on his back across his sea-bag.
+
+The man alongside of Larry emitted a menacing growl and started to spring
+belligerently to his feet.  But he never reached his feet.  Mr. Pike,
+with the back of same right hand, open, smote the man on the side of the
+face.  The loud smack of the impact was startling.  The mate's strength
+was amazing.  The blow looked so easy, so effortless; it had seemed like
+the lazy stroke of a good-natured bear, but in it was such a weight of
+bone and muscle that the man went down sidewise and rolled off the hatch
+on to the deck.
+
+At this moment, lurching aimlessly along, appeared O'Sullivan.  A sudden
+access of muttering, on his part, reached Mr. Pike's ear, and Mr. Pike,
+instantly keen as a wild animal, his paw in the act of striking
+O'Sullivan, whipped out like a revolver shot, "What's that?"  Then he
+noted the sense-struck face of O'Sullivan and withheld the blow.  "Bug-
+house," Mr. Pike commented.
+
+Involuntarily I had glanced to see if Captain West was on the poop, and
+found that we were hidden from the poop by the 'midship house.
+
+Mr. Pike, taking no notice of the man who lay groaning on the deck, stood
+over Larry, who was likewise groaning.  The rest of the sprawling men
+were on their feet, subdued and respectful.  I, too, was respectful of
+this terrific, aged figure of a man.  The exhibition had quite convinced
+me of the verity of his earlier driving and killing days.
+
+"Who's the old stiff now?" he demanded.
+
+"'Tis me, sir," Larry moaned contritely.
+
+"Get up!"
+
+Larry got up without any difficulty at all.
+
+"Now get for'ard to the windlass!  The rest of you!"
+
+And they went, sullenly, shamblingly, like the cowed brutes they were.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I climbed the ladder on the side of the for'ard house (which house
+contained, as I discovered, the forecastle, the galley, and the donkey-
+engine room), and went part way along the bridge to a position by the
+foremast, where I could observe the crew heaving up anchor.  The
+_Britannia_ was alongside, and we were getting under way.
+
+A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or
+variously engaged on the forecastle-head.  Of the crew proper were two
+watches of fifteen men each.  In addition were sailmakers, boys, bosuns,
+and the carpenter.  Nearly forty men were they, but such men!  They were
+sad and lifeless.  There was no vim, no go, no activity.  Every step and
+movement was an effort, as if they were dead men raised out of coffins or
+sick men dragged from hospital beds.  Sick they were--whiskey-poisoned.
+Starved they were, and weak from poor nutrition.  And worst of all, they
+were imbecile and lunatic.
+
+I looked aloft at the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and
+carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel masts
+and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and stays turned
+into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the sky.  That such a
+wretched muck of men should be able to work this magnificent ship through
+all storm and darkness and peril of the sea was beyond all seeming.  I
+remembered the two mates, the super-efficiency, mental and physical, of
+Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike--could they make this human wreckage do it?
+They, at least, evinced no doubts of their ability.  The sea?  If this
+feat of mastery were possible, then clear it was that I knew nothing of
+the sea.
+
+I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men who
+trod the dreary round of the windlass.  Mr. Pike was right.  These were
+not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old
+clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the points of their
+sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were killed, but who did their
+work as men.  These men, these shambling carcasses at the windlass--I
+looked, and looked, and vainly I strove to conjure the vision of them
+swinging aloft in rack and storm, "clearing the raffle," as Kipling puts
+it, "with their clasp knives in their teeth."  Why didn't they sing a
+chanty as they hove the anchor up?  In the old days, as I had read, the
+anchor always came up to the rollicking sailor songs of sea-chested men.
+
+I tired of watching the spiritless performance, and went aft on an
+exploring trip along the slender bridge.  It was a beautiful structure,
+strong yet light, traversing the length of the ship in three aerial
+leaps.  It spanned from the forecastle-head to the forecastle-house, next
+to the 'midship house, and then to the poop.  The poop, which was really
+the roof or deck over all the cabin space below, and which occupied the
+whole after-part of the ship, was very large.  It was broken only by the
+half-round and half-covered wheel-house at the very stern and by the
+chart-house.  On either side of the latter two doors opened into a tiny
+hallway.  This, in turn, gave access to the chart-room and to a stairway
+that led down into the cabin quarters beneath.
+
+I peeped into the chart-room and was greeted with a smile by Captain
+West.  He was lolling back comfortably in a swing chair, his feet cocked
+on the desk opposite.  On a broad, upholstered couch sat the pilot.  Both
+were smoking cigars; and, lingering for a moment to listen to the
+conversation, I grasped that the pilot was an ex-sea-captain.
+
+As I descended the stairs, from Miss West's room came a sound of humming
+and bustling, as she settled her belongings.  The energy she displayed,
+to judge by the cheerful noises of it, was almost perturbing.
+
+Passing by the pantry, I put my head inside the door to greet the steward
+and courteously let him know that I was aware of his existence.  Here, in
+his little realm, it was plain that efficiency reigned.  Everything was
+spotless and in order, and I could have wished and wished vainly for a
+more noiseless servant than he ashore.  His face, as he regarded me, had
+as little or as much expression as the Sphinx.  But his slant, black eyes
+were bright, with intelligence.
+
+"What do you think of the crew?" I asked, in order to put words to my
+invasion of his castle.
+
+"Buggy-house," he answered promptly, with a disgusted shake of the head.
+"Too much buggy-house.  All crazy.  You see.  No good.  Rotten.  Down to
+hell."
+
+That was all, but it verified my own judgment.  While it might be true,
+as Miss West had said, that every ship's crew contained several lunatics
+and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew contained far more
+than several.  In fact, and as it was to turn out, our crew, even in
+these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in so far as its
+helplessness and worthlessness were beyond the average.
+
+I found my own room (in reality it was two rooms) delightful.  Wada had
+unpacked and stored away my entire outfit of clothing, and had filled
+numerous shelves with the library I had brought along.  Everything was in
+order and place, from my shaving outfit in the drawer beside the wash-
+basin, and my sea-boots and oilskins hung ready to hand, to my writing
+materials on the desk, before which a swing arm-chair,
+leather-upholstered and screwed solidly to the floor, invited me.  My
+pyjamas and dressing-gown were out.  My slippers, in their accustomed
+place by the bed, also invited me.
+
+Here, aft, all was fitness, intelligence.  On deck it was what I have
+described--a nightmare spawn of creatures, assumably human, but
+malformed, mentally and physically, into caricatures of men.  Yes, it was
+an unusual crew; and that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire could whip it into
+the efficient shape necessary to work this vast and intricate and
+beautiful fabric of a ship was beyond all seeming of possibility.
+
+Depressed as I was by what I had just witnessed on deck, there came to
+me, as I leaned back in my chair and opened the second volume of George
+Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, a premonition that the voyage was to be
+disastrous.  But then, as I looked about the room, measured its generous
+space, realized that I was more comfortably situated than I had ever been
+on any passenger steamer, I dismissed foreboding thoughts and caught a
+pleasant vision of myself, through weeks and months, catching up with all
+the necessary reading which I had so long neglected.
+
+Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew.  No, he hadn't, but the
+steward had said that in all his years at sea this was the worst crew he
+had ever seen.
+
+"He say, all crazy, no sailors, rotten," Wada said.  "He say all big
+fools and bime by much trouble.  'You see,' he say all the time.  'You
+see, You see.'  He pretty old man--fifty-five years, he say.  Very smart
+man for Chinaman.  Just now, first time for long time, he go to sea.
+Before, he have big business in San Francisco.  Then he get much
+trouble--police.  They say he opium smuggle.  Oh, big, big trouble.  But
+he catch good lawyer.  He no go to jail.  But long time lawyer work, and
+when trouble all finish lawyer got all his business, all his money,
+everything.  Then he go to sea, like before.  He make good money.  He get
+sixty-five dollars a month on this ship.  But he don't like.  Crew all
+crazy.  When this time finish he leave ship, go back start business in
+San Francisco."
+
+Later, when I had Wada open one of the ports for ventilation, I could
+hear the gurgle and swish of water alongside, and I knew the anchor was
+up and that we were in the grip of the _Britannia_, towing down the
+Chesapeake to sea.  The idea suggested itself that it was not too late.  I
+could very easily abandon the adventure and return to Baltimore on the
+_Britannia_ when she cast off the _Elsinore_.  And then I heard a slight
+tinkling of china from the pantry as the steward proceeded to set the
+table, and, also, it was so warm and comfortable, and George Moore was so
+irritatingly fascinating.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+In every way dinner proved up beyond my expectations, and I registered a
+note that the cook, whoever or whatever he might be, was a capable man at
+his trade.  Miss West served, and, though she and the steward were
+strangers, they worked together splendidly.  I should have thought, from
+the smoothness of the service, that he was an old house servant who for
+years had known her every way.
+
+The pilot ate in the chart-house, so that at table were the four of us
+that would always be at table together.  Captain West and his daughter
+faced each other, while I, on the captain's right, faced Mr. Pike.  This
+put Miss West across the corner on my right.
+
+Mr. Pike, his dark sack coat (put on for the meal) bulging and wrinkling
+over the lumps of muscles that padded his stooped shoulders, had nothing
+at all to say.  But he had eaten too many years at captains' tables not
+to have proper table manners.  At first I thought he was abashed by Miss
+West's presence.  Later, I decided it was due to the presence of the
+captain.  For Captain West had a way with him that I was beginning to
+learn.  Far removed as Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire were from the sailors,
+individuals as they were of an entirely different and superior breed, yet
+equally as different and far removed from his officers was Captain West.
+He was a serene and absolute aristocrat.  He neither talked "ship" nor
+anything else to Mr. Pike.
+
+On the other hand, Captain West's attitude toward me was that of a social
+equal.  But then, I was a passenger.  Miss West treated me the same way,
+but unbent more to Mr. Pike.  And Mr. Pike, answering her with "Yes,
+Miss," and "No, Miss," ate good-manneredly and with his shaggy-browed
+gray eyes studied me across the table.  I, too, studied him.  Despite his
+violent past, killer and driver that he was, I could not help liking the
+man.  He was honest, genuine.  Almost more than for that, I liked him for
+the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave on the occasions when I reached the
+points of several funny stories.  No man could laugh like that and be all
+bad.  I was glad that it was he, and not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit
+opposite throughout the voyage.  And I was very glad that Mr. Mellaire
+was not to eat with us at all.
+
+I am afraid that Miss West and I did most of the talking.  She was
+breezy, vivacious, tonic, and I noted again that the delicate, almost
+fragile oval of her face was given the lie by her body.  She was a
+robust, healthy young woman.  That was undeniable.  Not fat--heaven
+forbid!--not even plump; yet her lines had that swelling roundness that
+accompanies long, live muscles.  She was full-bodied, vigorous; and yet
+not so full-bodied as she seemed.  I remember with what surprise, when we
+arose from table, I noted her slender waist.  At that moment I got the
+impression that she was willowy.  And willowy she was, with a normal
+waist and with, in addition, always that informing bodily vigour that
+made her appear rounder and robuster than she really was.
+
+It was the health of her that interested me.  When I studied her face
+more closely I saw that only the lines of the oval of it were delicate.
+Delicate it was not, nor fragile.  The flesh was firm, and the texture of
+the skin was firm and fine as it moved over the firm muscles of face and
+neck.  The neck was a beautiful and adequate pillar of white.  Its flesh
+was firm, its skin fine, and it was muscular.  The hands, too, attracted
+me--not small, but well-shaped, fine, white and strong, and well cared
+for.  I could only conclude that she was an unusual captain's daughter,
+just as her father was an unusual captain and man.  And their noses were
+alike, just the hint-touch of the beak of power and race.
+
+While Miss West was telling of the unexpectedness of the voyage, of how
+suddenly she had decided to come--she accounted for it as a whim--and
+while she told of all the complications she had encountered in her haste
+of preparation, I found myself casting up a tally of the efficient ones
+on board the _Elsinore_.  They were Captain West and his daughter, the
+two mates, myself, of course, Wada and the steward, and, beyond the
+shadow of a doubt, the cook.  The dinner vouched for him.  Thus I found
+our total of efficients to be eight.  But the cook, the steward, and Wada
+were servants, not sailors, while Miss West and myself were
+supernumeraries.  Remained to work, direct, do, but three efficients out
+of a total ship's company of forty-five.  I had no doubt that other
+efficients there were; it seemed impossible that my first impression of
+the crew should be correct.  There was the carpenter.  He might, at his
+trade, be as good as the cook.  Then the two sailmakers, whom I had not
+yet seen, might prove up.
+
+A little later during the meal I ventured to talk about what had
+interested me and aroused my admiration, namely, the masterfulness with
+which Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire had gripped hold of that woeful,
+worthless crew.  It was all new to me, I explained, but I appreciated the
+need of it.  As I led up to the occurrence on Number Two hatch, when Mr.
+Pike had lifted up Larry and toppled him back with a mere slap from the
+ends of his fingers, I saw in Mr. Pike's eyes a warning, almost
+threatening, expression.  Nevertheless, I completed my description of the
+episode.
+
+When I had quite finished there was a silence.  Miss West was busy
+serving coffee from a copper percolator.  Mr. Pike, profoundly occupied
+with cracking walnuts, could not quite hide the wicked, little,
+half-humorous, half-revengeful gleam in his eyes.  But Captain West
+looked straight at me, but from oh! such a distance--millions and
+millions of miles away.  His clear blue eyes were as serene as ever, his
+tones as low and soft.
+
+"It is the one rule I ask to be observed, Mr. Pathurst--we never discuss
+the sailors."
+
+It was a facer to me, and with quite a pronounced fellow-feeling for
+Larry I hurriedly added:
+
+"It was not merely the discipline that interested me.  It was the feat of
+strength."
+
+"Sailors are trouble enough without our hearing about them, Mr.
+Pathurst," Captain West went on, as evenly and imperturbably as if I had
+not spoken.  "I leave the handling of the sailors to my officers.  That's
+their business, and they are quite aware that I tolerate no undeserved
+roughness or severity."
+
+Mr. Pike's harsh face carried the faintest shadow of an amused grin as he
+stolidly regarded the tablecloth.  I glanced to Miss West for sympathy.
+She laughed frankly, and said:
+
+"You see, father never has any sailors.  And it's a good plan, too."
+
+"A very good plan," Mr. Pike muttered.
+
+Then Miss West kindly led the talk away from that subject, and soon had
+us laughing with a spirited recital of a recent encounter of hers with a
+Boston cab-driver.
+
+Dinner over, I stepped to my room in quest of cigarettes, and
+incidentally asked Wada about the cook.  Wada was always a great gatherer
+of information.
+
+"His name Louis," he said.  "He Chinaman, too.  No; only half Chinaman.
+Other half Englishman.  You know one island Napoleon he stop long time
+and bime by die that island?"
+
+"St. Helena," I prompted.
+
+"Yes, that place Louis he born.  He talk very good English."
+
+At this moment, entering the hall from the deck, Mr. Mellaire, just
+relieved by the mate, passed me on his way to the big room in the stern
+where the second table was set.  His "Good evening, sir," was as stately
+and courteous as any southern gentleman of the old days could have
+uttered it.  And yet I could not like the man.  His outward seeming was
+so at variance with the personality that resided within.  Even as he
+spoke and smiled I felt that from inside his skull he was watching me,
+studying me.  And somehow, in a flash of intuition, I knew not why, I was
+reminded of the three strange young men, routed last from the forecastle,
+to whom Mr. Pike had read the law.  They, too, had given me a similar
+impression.
+
+Behind Mr. Mellaire slouched a self-conscious, embarrassed individual,
+with the face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant.  His feet were
+even larger than Mr. Pike's, but the hands--I shot a quick glance to
+see--were not so large as Mr. Pike's.
+
+As they passed I looked inquiry to Wada.
+
+"He carpenter.  He sat second table.  His name Sam Lavroff.  He come from
+New York on ship.  Steward say he very young for carpenter, maybe twenty-
+two, three years old."
+
+As I approached the open port over my desk I again heard the swish and
+gurgle of water and again realized that we were under way.  So steady and
+noiseless was our progress, that, say seated at table, it never entered
+one's head that we were moving or were anywhere save on the solid land. I
+had been used to steamers all my life, and it was difficult immediately
+to adjust myself to the absence of the propeller-thrust vibration.
+
+"Well, what do you think?" I asked Wada, who, like myself, had never made
+a sailing-ship voyage.
+
+He smiled politely.
+
+"Very funny ship.  Very funny sailors. I don't know.  Mebbe all right.  We
+see."
+
+"You think trouble?" I asked pointedly.
+
+"I think sailors very funny," he evaded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for'ard along the deck to where
+work was going on.  Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed in the
+starlight. Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I might judge,
+who was only the veriest tyro in such matters.  The indistinguishable
+shapes of men, in long lines, pulled on ropes.  They pulled in sick and
+dogged silence, though Mr. Pike, ubiquitous, snarled out orders and
+rapped out oaths from every angle upon their miserable heads.
+
+Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever proceeded
+so sadly and blunderingly to sea.  Ere long Mr. Mellaire joined Mr. Pike
+in the struggle of directing the men.  It was not yet eight in the
+evening, and all hands were at work.  They did not seem to know the
+ropes.  Time and again, when the half-hearted suggestions of the bosuns
+had been of no avail, I saw one or the other of the mates leap to the
+rail and put the right rope in the hands of the men.
+
+These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones.  Up aloft, from
+sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who were at
+least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails.
+
+But on deck!  Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope that
+hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with painfully
+slow movements.  "Walk away with it!" Mr. Pike would yell.  And perhaps
+for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the rope ere they
+came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill.  And yet, did either of the
+mates spring in and add his strength, they were able to move right along
+the deck without stopping.  Either of the mates, old men that they were,
+was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of the wretched creatures.
+
+"This is what sailin's come to," Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
+"This ain't the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling.  But
+what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?"
+
+"I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled," I said.
+
+"Sure they do.  Want to hear 'em?"
+
+I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that
+I'd like to very much.
+
+"Here, you bosun!" Mr. Pike snarled.  "Wake up!  Start a song!  Topsail
+halyards!"
+
+In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
+pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness
+freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
+
+Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
+have issued so sepulchral a plaint.  It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
+unlively, and indescribably doleful.  Yet the words showed that it should
+have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words
+poor Nancy sang were:
+
+   "Away, way, way, yar,
+   We'll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots."
+
+"Quit it!  Quit it!" Mr. Pike roared.  "This ain't a funeral!  Ain't
+there one of you that can sing?  Come on, now!  It's a topsail-yard--"
+
+He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of
+the men's hands to put into them the right rope.
+
+"Come on, bosun!  Break her out!"
+
+Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy and
+even more lugubrious than Nancy's:
+
+   "Then up aloft that yard must go,
+   Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two men
+feebly mumbled it.  Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
+
+   "Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue."
+
+Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin and
+lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
+
+   "And whiskey killed the old man, too,
+   Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the work
+and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
+until he interrupted the song to cry "Belay!"
+
+And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
+maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling and
+shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and, when they
+did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope first.  Skulkers
+there were among them, too; and once, from for'ard of the 'midship house,
+I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and out of the darkness hurriedly
+emerged two men, on their heels Mr. Pike, who chanted a recital of the
+distressing things that would befall them if he caught them at such
+tricks again.
+
+The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further, so I
+strolled aft and climbed the poop.  In the lee of the chart-house Captain
+West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down.  Passing on aft, I saw
+steering at the wheel the weazened little old man I had noted earlier in
+the day.  In the light of the binnacle his small blue eyes looked more
+malevolent than ever.  So weazened and tiny was he, and so large was the
+brass-studded wheel, that they seemed of a height.  His face was
+withered, scorched, and wrinkled, and in all seeming he was fifty years
+older than Mr. Pike.  He was the most remarkable figure of a burnt-out,
+aged man one would expect to find able seaman on one of the proudest
+sailing-ships afloat.  Later, through Wada, I was to learn that his name
+was Andy Fay and that he claimed no more years than sixty-three.
+
+I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared up at
+the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there.  No, I
+decided I was not keen on the voyage.  The whole atmosphere of it was
+wrong.  There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-ends.  There
+was Miss West coming along.  There was the crew of broken men and
+lunatics.  I wondered if the wounded Greek in the 'midship house still
+gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up; and I was quite sure I
+would not care to witness such a transaction in surgery.
+
+Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of the
+voyage.  So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in sailing-
+ships.  So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not exist.  And
+as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she could not be
+anything else than an optimist in such matters.  She had always lived;
+her red blood sang to her only that she would always live and that
+nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious personality.
+
+Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood.  Such was my condition that
+the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to me--for I
+knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be.  And for five
+months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a pound of tobacco
+or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent on the same ship with
+her.  As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was I that ere
+the voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love to me.  Please
+do not mistake me.  My certainty in this matter was due, not to any
+exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my anything but
+exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men.  In my
+experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks
+the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable
+surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.
+
+Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-weariness,
+intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young man of
+thirty.  For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these things--weary and
+in doubt.  It was because of this state that I was undertaking the
+voyage.  I wanted to get away by myself, to get away from all these
+things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter over.
+
+It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness had
+been brought about by the success of my play--my first play, as every one
+knows.  But it had been such a success that it raised the doubt in my own
+mind, just as the success of my several volumes of verse had raised
+doubts.  Was the public right?  Were the critics right?  Surely the
+function of the artist was to voice life, yet what did I know of life?
+
+So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that afflicted
+me.  Really, I had been, and was, very sick.  Mad thoughts of isolating
+myself entirely from the world had hounded me.  I had even canvassed the
+idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of my years to the
+lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and strong, who had no
+particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I knew how to spend, who
+by my own achievement had put my name on the lips of men and proved
+myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that mad that I had considered
+the lazar house for a destiny.
+
+Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head.  Very well.
+Granted.  But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible fact--my
+sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact.  This I knew: I
+had reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a life-climacteric
+of some sort.  And I had diagnosed my own case and prescribed this
+voyage.  And here was the atrociously healthy and profoundly feminine
+Miss West along--the very last ingredient I would have considered
+introducing into my prescription.
+
+A woman!  Woman!  Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their
+persecutions to know them.  I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not
+entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world, and
+an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue me?  They would have
+pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic place
+alone, for the sake of my income alone.
+
+Yes; and love!  Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
+love?  That, too, was of old time with me.  I, too, had throbbed and sung
+and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead.  But it
+was so long ago.  How young I was--turned twenty-four!  And after that I
+had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I
+had laughed again and done my share of philandering with the pretty,
+ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of my fortune and
+artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired disgusted from the lists
+of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking adventures in the realm of
+mind.  And here I was, on board the _Elsinore_, unhorsed by my encounters
+with the problems of the ultimate, carried off the field with a broken
+pate.
+
+As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
+could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as she
+made her little nest.  And from her my thought drifted on to the
+everlasting mystery of woman.  Yes, I, with all the futuristic contempt
+for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.
+
+Oh, no illusions, thank you.  Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
+possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than Lucifer
+and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid, attraction for the
+thinker.  What is this flame of her, blazing through all her
+contradictions and ignobilities?--this ruthless passion for life, always
+for life, more life on the planet?  At times it seems to me brazen, and
+awful, and soulless.  At times I am made petulant by it.  And at other
+times I am swayed by the sublimity of it.  No; there is no escape from
+woman.  Always, as a savage returns to a dark glen where goblins are and
+gods may be, so do I return to the contemplation of woman.
+
+Mr. Pike's voice interrupted my musings.  From for'ard, on the main deck,
+I heard him snarl:
+
+"On the main-topsail-yard, there!--if you cut that gasket I'll split your
+damned skull!"
+
+Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he called
+to I concluded was the training-ship boy.
+
+"You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!" he cried.  "Don't make those
+gaskets up!  Fetch 'em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!"
+
+Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed.  As my hand
+went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate's voice rang
+out:
+
+"Come on, you gentlemen's sons in disguise!  Wake up!  Lively now!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+I did not sleep well.  To begin with, I read late.  Not till two in the
+morning did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp which Wada
+had purchased and installed for me.  I was asleep immediately--perfect
+sleep being perhaps my greatest gift; but almost immediately I was awake
+again.  And thereafter, with dozings and cat-naps and restless tossings,
+I struggled to win to sleep, then gave it up.  For of all things, in my
+state of jangled nerves, to be afflicted with hives!  And still again, to
+be afflicted with hives in cold winter weather!
+
+At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated skin in
+Vernon Lee's delightful screed against William James, and his "will to
+believe."  I was on the weather side of the ship, and from overhead,
+through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer on watch.  I
+knew that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and wondered whether they
+were Mr. Mellaire's or the pilot's.  Somebody above there was awake.  The
+work was going on, the vigilant seeing and overseeing, that, I could
+plainly conclude, would go on through every hour of all the hours on the
+voyage.
+
+At half-past four I heard the steward's alarm go off, instantly
+suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in
+through my open door.  What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada had
+been with me through too many years for me to doubt that he had given the
+steward precise instructions and turned over to him my coffee and my
+coffee-making apparatus.
+
+The steward was a jewel.  In ten minutes he served me with a perfect cup
+of coffee.  I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found me,
+breakfast in bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck.  We were
+still towing, but all sails were set to a light favouring breeze from the
+north.  In the chart-room Captain West and the pilot were smoking cigars.
+At the wheel I noted what I decided at once was an efficient.  He was not
+a large man; if anything he was undersized.  But his countenance was
+broad-browed and intelligently formed.  Tom, I later learned, was his
+name--Tom Spink, an Englishman.  He was blue-eyed, fair-skinned, well-
+grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty years of age.  His reply of "Good
+morning, sir" was cheery, and he smiled as he uttered the simple phrase.
+He did not look sailor-like, as did Henry, the training-ship boy; and yet
+I felt at once that he was a sailor, and an able one.
+
+It was Mr. Pike's watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
+admitted that the man was the "best of the boiling."
+
+Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and her
+vital, springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing her
+contacts.  On asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly, she
+demanded an explanation.  I told her of my affliction of hives and showed
+her the lumps on my wrists.
+
+"Your blood needs thinning and cooling," she adjudged promptly.  "Wait a
+minute.  I'll see what can be done for you."
+
+And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand a
+part glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream of
+tartar.
+
+"Drink it," she ordered, as a matter of course.
+
+I drank it.  And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-chair
+with a second dose of the stuff.  Also she reproached me soundly for
+permitting Wada to feed meat to Possum.  It was from her that Wada and I
+learned how mortal a sin it was to give meat to a young puppy.
+Furthermore, she laid down the law and the diet for Possum, not alone to
+me and Wada, but to the steward, the carpenter, and Mr. Mellaire.  Of the
+latter two, because they ate by themselves in the big after-room and
+because Possum played there, she was especially suspicious; and she was
+outspoken in voicing her suspicions to their faces.  The carpenter
+mumbled embarrassed asseverations in broken English of past, present, and
+future innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before her on
+his huge feet.  Mr. Mellaire's protestations were of the same nature,
+save that they were made with the grace and suavity of a Chesterfield.
+
+In short, Possum's diet raised quite a tempest in the _Elsinore_ teapot,
+and by the time it was over Miss West had established this particular
+contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the mutual owners of
+the puppy.  I noticed, later in the day, that it was to Miss West that
+Wada went for instructions as to the quantity of warm water he must use
+to dilute Possum's condensed milk.
+
+Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook.  In the afternoon I made
+a trip for'ard to the galley to make his acquaintance.  To all intents he
+was a Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by speech alone, he
+was an Englishman.  In fact, so cultured was his speech that I can fairly
+say it was vested with an Oxford accent.  He, too, was old, fully
+sixty--he acknowledged fifty-nine.  Three things about him were markedly
+conspicuous: his smile, that embraced all of his clean-shaven Asiatic
+face and Asiatic eyes; his even-rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which I
+deemed false until Wada ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands and
+feet.  It was his hands, ridiculously small and beautifully modelled,
+that led my scrutiny to his feet.  They, too, were ridiculously small and
+very neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.
+
+We had put the pilot off at midday, but the _Britannia_ towed us well
+into the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide about
+us and the land a faint blur on the western horizon.  Here, at the moment
+of leaving the tug, we made our "departure"--that is to say, technically
+began the voyage, despite the fact that we had already travelled a full
+twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.
+
+It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the poop-rail
+gazing for'ard, when Miss West joined me.  She had been busy below all
+day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of air.  She
+surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five minutes, then
+remarked:
+
+"The barometer's very high--30 degrees 60.  This light north wind won't
+last.  It will either go into a calm or work around into a north-east
+gale."
+
+"Which would you prefer?" I asked.
+
+"The gale, by all means.  It will help us off the land, and it will put
+me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly.  Oh, yes," she added,
+"I'm a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the beginning of every
+voyage.  You probably won't see me for a couple of days now.  That's why
+I've been so busy getting settled first."
+
+"Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea," I
+said.
+
+"And I've seen father sea-sick on occasion," she answered.  "Yes, and
+some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known."
+
+Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting pacing
+up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.
+
+Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck
+below us.  To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing
+than ever.
+
+"A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike," Miss West remarked.
+
+"The worst ever," he growled, "and I've seen some pretty bad ones.  We're
+teachin' them the ropes just now--most of 'em."
+
+"They look starved," I commented.
+
+"They are, they almost always are," Miss West answered, and her eyes
+roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer's fashion I had
+marked in Mr. Pike.  "But they'll fatten up with regular hours, no
+whiskey, and solid food--won't they, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"Oh, sure.  They always do.  And you'll see them liven up when we get 'em
+in hand . . . maybe.  They're a measly lot, though."
+
+I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas.  Our four masts seemed to
+have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us,
+under Mr. Mellaire's direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs,
+between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one
+another.  The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these
+small sails led me to ask:
+
+"But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
+were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an
+earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from
+both sides of a street.
+
+"Do?" Miss West answered for him.  "We'd get the sail off.  Oh, it can be
+done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew.  If it couldn't, I should
+have been drowned long ago."
+
+"Sure," Mr. Pike upheld her.  "So would I."
+
+"The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in a
+pinch," Miss West went on.
+
+Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big paws,
+relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite unconsciously
+tensed and folded themselves into fists.  Also, I noted fresh abrasions
+on the knuckles.  Miss West laughed heartily, as from some recollection.
+
+"I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most
+hopeless crew.  It was in the _Lallah Rookh_--you remember her, Mr.
+Pike?"
+
+"Your father's fifth command," he nodded.  "Lost on the West Coast
+afterwards--went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave.  Parted
+her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on her."
+
+"That's the ship.  Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
+bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else.  Where the
+boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining.  A number of them
+were shanghaied, that was certain.  You should have seen them when they
+were first sent aloft."  Again she laughed.  "It was better than circus
+clowns.  And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when it
+began to blow up and we began to shorten down.  And then our mates
+performed miracles.  You remember Mr. Harding--Silas Harding?"
+
+"Don't I though!" Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically.  "He was some
+man, and he must have been an old man even then."
+
+"He was, and a terrible man," she concurred, and added, almost
+reverently: "And a wonderful man."  She turned her face to me.  "He was
+our mate.  The men were sea-sick and miserable and green.  But Mr.
+Harding got the sail off the _Lallah Rookh_ just the same.  What I wanted
+to tell you was this:
+
+"I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
+those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail.  How
+far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"Let me see . . . the _Lallah Rookh_."  Mr. Pike paused to consider.  "Oh,
+say around a hundred feet."
+
+"I saw it myself.  One of the green hands, a tramp--and he must already
+have got a taste of Mr. Harding--fell off the lower-topsail-yard.  I was
+only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was falling
+from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck.  But he fell
+into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a somersault,
+and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt.  And he landed right alongside
+of Mr. Harding, facing him.  I don't know which was the more astonished,
+but I think Mr. Harding was, for he stood there petrified.  He had
+expected the man to be killed.  Not so the man.  He took one look at Mr.
+Harding, then made a wild jump for the rigging and climbed right back up
+to that topsail-yard."
+
+Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me
+say:
+
+"Astonishing!  Think of the jar to the man's nerves, falling to apparent
+death that way."
+
+"He'd been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess," was Mr. Pike's
+remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.
+
+Which was all very well in a way.  Ships were ships, and judging by what
+I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary.  But that a
+young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things and
+be so saturated in this side of ship life was not nice.  It was not nice
+for me, though it interested me, I confess,--and strengthened my grip on
+reality.  Yet it meant a hardening of one's fibres, and I did not like to
+think of Miss West being so hardened.
+
+I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
+firmness of her skin.  Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
+were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes.  Gray her eyes
+were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression, intelligent
+and alive.  Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most noteworthy
+expression of it was a great calm.  She seemed always in repose, at peace
+with herself and with the external world.  The most beautiful feature was
+her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows and hair.  The most
+admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very straight, and just
+the slightest trifle too long.  In this it was reminiscent of her
+father's nose.  But the perfect modelling of the bridge and nostrils
+conveyed an indescribable advertisement of race and blood.
+
+Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous
+mouth--generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but
+generous rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter.  All the health
+and buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes.  She rarely
+exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed chiefly to
+employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong white teeth,
+even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm, sensible, normal
+size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal as she.
+
+I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many of
+the factors that go to compose feminine beauty.  She had all the beauty
+of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was emphasized
+by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair.  And, in the same way,
+the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of skin set off the
+warm gray of her eyes.  The forehead was, well, medium-broad and medium
+high, and quite smooth.  No lines nor hints of lines were there,
+suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of depression and white nights of
+insomnia.  Oh, she bore all the marks of the healthy, human female, who
+never worried nor was vexed in the spirit of her, and in whose body every
+process and function was frictionless and automatic.
+
+"Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet," I said to the
+mate.  "Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?"
+
+"She ought to be," was Mr. Pike's reply as he lifted his glance across
+the smooth swell of sea to the sky.  "This ain't the first time she's
+been on the North Atlantic in winter."  He debated a moment, as he
+studied the sea and sky.  "I should say, considering the high barometer,
+we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with the
+chances in favour of the calm."
+
+She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail
+as the _Elsinore_ lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the
+trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in hollow
+thunder.
+
+"The calm has it," Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness.  "And if
+this keeps up I'll be in my bunk in about five minutes."
+
+She waved aside all sympathy.  "Oh, don't bother about me, Mr. Pathurst.
+Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy
+weather, and poison ivy; besides, I'd rather be sea-sick than have the
+hives."
+
+Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or
+blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire's raised voice.  Like
+Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly
+unpleasant to the ear.
+
+On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence.  One, in
+particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.
+
+"Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark," I observed.
+
+Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West's
+eyes to Mr. Pike's big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on
+the rail.  It was a stab of hurt to me.  _She knew_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
+table, while the _Elsinore_ rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to
+her room.
+
+"You won't see her for a couple of days," Captain West told me.  "Her
+mother was the same way--a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of
+a voyage."
+
+"It's the shaking down."  Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
+observation I had yet heard him utter at table.  "Everybody has to shake
+down when they leave the land.  We've got to forget the good times on
+shore, and the good things money'll buy, and start watch and watch, four
+hours on deck and four below.  And it comes hard, and all our tempers are
+strung until we can make the change.  Did it happen that you heard Caruso
+and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?"
+
+I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.
+
+"Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
+every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give
+it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch."
+
+"You don't like the sea?" I queried.
+
+He sighed.
+
+"I don't know.  But of course the sea is all I know--"
+
+"Except music," I threw in.
+
+"Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of
+the music I oughta have had coming to me."
+
+"I suppose you've heard Schumann Heink?"
+
+"Wonderful, wonderful!" he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an
+eager wistfulness.  "I've half-a-dozen of her records, and I've got the
+second dog-watch below.  If Captain West don't mind . . . "  (Captain
+West nodded that he didn't mind).  "And if you'd want to hear them?  The
+machine is a good one."
+
+And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this
+hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of the
+sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid collection of
+phonograph records.  These, and the machine, he placed on the table.  The
+big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the main cabin into one
+large room.  It was in the cabin that Captain West and I lolled in big
+leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph.  His face was in a
+blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and every shade of expression was
+visible to me.
+
+In vain I waited for him to start some popular song.  His records were
+only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation.  He
+handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping it
+and brushing it with a fine camel's hair brush while it revolved and ere
+he placed the needle on it.  For a time all I could see was the huge
+brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the knuckles, that expressed
+love in their every movement.  Each touch on the discs was a caress, and
+while the record played he hovered over it and dreamed in some heaven of
+music all his own.
+
+During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar.  His face was
+expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music.  I
+almost doubted that he heard it.  He made no remarks between whiles,
+betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure.  He seemed
+preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote.  And while I watched him
+I wondered what his duties were.  I had not seen him perform any.  Mr.
+Pike had attended to the loading of the ship.  Not until she was ready
+for sea had Captain West come on board.  I had not seen him give an
+order.  It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did the work.  All
+Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully oblivious of the
+_Elsinore's_ crew.
+
+When Mr. Pike had played the "Hallelujah Chorus" from the _Messiah_, and
+"He Shall Feed His Flock," he mentioned to me, almost apologetically,
+that he liked sacred music, and for the reason, perhaps, that for a short
+period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he had been a choir boy.
+
+"And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and sneaked
+off to sea again," he concluded with a harsh laugh.
+
+And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer's "King of
+Heaven," and Mendelssohn's "O Rest in the Lord."
+
+When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all
+carefully wrapped, back into his room.  I lingered with him while he
+rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.
+
+"I've got a lot more good things," he said confidentially: "Coenen's
+'Come Unto Me,' and Faure's 'Crucifix'; and there's 'O Salutaris,' and
+'Lead, Kindly Light' by the Trinity Choir; and 'Jesu, Lover of My Soul'
+would just melt your heart.  I'll play 'em for you some night."
+
+"Do you believe in them?" I was led to ask by his rapt expression and by
+the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from my
+consciousness.
+
+He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:
+
+"I do . . . when I'm listening to them."
+
+* * * * *
+
+My sleep that night was wretched.  Short of sleep from the previous
+night, I closed my book and turned my light off early.  But scarcely had
+I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my
+hives.  All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the
+light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up.  Wada had not
+yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of tartar.  It was
+useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the watch changing, I
+partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and went up on to the
+poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours' watch, pacing up and down
+the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the
+wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the wheel-
+house.
+
+Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and
+lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and
+experienced premonitions of disaster.  How could such a voyage be
+possible, with such a crew, on the huge _Elsinore_, a cargo-carrier that
+was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five thousand
+tons of coal?  It was appalling to contemplate.  The voyage had gone
+wrong from the first.  In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep
+brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was
+doomed.  Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman could
+have dreamed.
+
+I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no
+doubts but what she would always live.  I thought of the killing and
+driving and music-loving Mr. Pike.  Many a haler remnant than he had gone
+down on a last voyage.  As for Captain West, he did not count.  He was
+too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had
+nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of his own
+creating.
+
+Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and lying
+gibbering between the steel walls of the 'midship-house.  This picture
+almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified the whole
+mad, helpless, idiotic crew.  Certainly I could go back to Baltimore.
+Thank God I had the money to humour my whims.  Had not Mr. Pike told me,
+in reply to a question, that he estimated the running expenses of the
+_Elsinore_ at two hundred dollars a day?  I could afford to pay two
+hundred a day, or two thousand, for the several days that might be
+necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot tug, or any inbound
+craft to Baltimore.
+
+I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to tell
+him my decision, when another presented itself: _Then are you_, _the
+thinker and philosopher_, _the world-sick one_, _afraid to go down_, _to
+cease in the darkness_?  Bah!  My own pride in my life-pridelessness
+saved Captain West's sleep from interruption.  Of course I would go on
+with the adventure, if adventure it might be called, to go sailing around
+Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and lunatics--and worse; for I
+remembered the three Babylonish and Semitic ones who had aroused Mr.
+Pike's ire and who had laughed so terribly and silently.
+
+Night thoughts!  Sleepless thoughts!  I dismissed them all and started
+below, chilled through by the cold.  But at the chart-room door I
+encountered Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"A pleasant evening, sir," he greeted me.  "A pity there's not a little
+wind to help us off the land."
+
+"What do you think of the crew?" I asked, after a moment or so.
+
+Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I've seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst.  But I never saw
+one as queer as this--boys, old men, cripples and--you saw Tony the Greek
+go overboard yesterday?  Well, that's only the beginning.  He's a sample.
+I've got a big Irishman in my watch who's going bad.  Did you notice a
+little, dried-up Scotchman?"
+
+"Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the evening
+before last?"
+
+"The very one--Andy Fay.  Well, Andy Fay's just been complaining to me
+about O'Sullivan.  Says O'Sullivan's threatened his life.  When Andy Fay
+went off watch at eight he found O'Sullivan stropping a razor.  I'll give
+you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:
+
+"'Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?"
+"Certainly," says I; "what can I do for you?"  "Sell me your sea-boots,
+Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be.  "But what will you be
+wantin' of them?" says I.  "'Twill be a great favour," says O'Sullivan.
+"But it's my only pair," says I; "and you have a pair of your own," says
+I.  "Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather," says O'Sullivan.
+"Besides," says I, "you have no money."  "I'll pay for them when we pay
+off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan.  "I'll not do it," says I; "besides,
+you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin' with them."  "But I will tell
+yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to throw 'em over the side."  And
+with that I turns to walk away, but O'Sullivan says, very polite and
+seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you
+kindly step this way an' have your throat cut?"  And with that I knew my
+life was in danger, and I have come to make report to you, sir, that the
+man is a violent lunatic.'
+
+"Or soon will be," I remarked.  "I noticed him yesterday, a big man
+muttering continually to himself?"
+
+"That's the man," Mr. Mellaire said.
+
+"Do you have many such at sea?" I asked.
+
+"More than my share, I do believe, sir."
+
+He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement he
+pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing match
+that I might see.
+
+I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald, but
+partially covered with a few sparse long hairs.  And full across this
+crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the most
+prodigious scar I had ever seen.  Because the vision of it was so
+fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar's very
+prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have sworn that I
+could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and that it was fully
+two fingers broad.  There seemed no bone at all, just a great fissure, a
+deep valley covered with skin; and I was confident that the brain pulsed
+immediately under that skin.
+
+He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.
+
+"A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe.  We were
+thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the time,
+running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his addled head
+that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn't let him go
+ashore.  I had my back to him at the time, and I never knew what struck
+me."
+
+"But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?" I questioned.
+"There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have had
+wonderful vitality."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses."
+
+"Molasses!"
+
+"Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics.  He
+always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings.  I lay in my bunk many
+weary weeks--we had a long passage--and by the time we reached Hong Kong
+the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was
+standing my third mate's watch--we carried third mates in those days."
+
+Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr.
+Mellaire's head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the
+_Elsinore_.  Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received
+the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he
+would have been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed
+passenger with a proposition capable of going to the extent of buying the
+_Elsinore_ outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed
+straight back to Baltimore.
+
+As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr. Mellaire
+should have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.
+
+We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening,
+and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to
+infest the sea.
+
+And yet I could not like the man.  In nothing he said, nor in the manner
+of saying things, could I find fault.  He seemed generous, broad-minded,
+and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world.  It was easy for me
+to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of social
+mannerism.  It was not that.  But all the time I was distressingly, and,
+I suppose, intuitively aware, though in the darkness I couldn't even see
+his eyes, that there, behind those eyes, inside that skull, was
+ambuscaded an alien personality that spied upon me, measured me, studied
+me, and that said one thing while it thought another thing.
+
+When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I had
+been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature.  The
+other half had not spoken.  Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick,
+behind the mask of words and flesh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+But I could not sleep.  I took more cream of tartar.  It must be the heat
+of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives.  And yet, whenever
+I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and read, my skin
+irritation decreased.  But as soon as I turned out the lamp and closed my
+eyes I was troubled again.  So hour after hour passed, through which,
+between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to wade through many pages of
+Rosny's _Le Termite_--a not very cheerful proceeding, I must say,
+concerned as it is with the microscopic and over-elaborate recital of
+Noel Servaise's tortured nerves, bodily pains, and intellectual
+phantasma.  At last I tossed the novel aside, damned all analytical
+Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in the more genial and
+cynical Stendhal.
+
+Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down.  At
+four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike's
+promenade.  Half an hour later, just as the steward's alarm went off,
+instantly checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the _Elsinore_ began to
+heel over on my side.  I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling orders,
+and at times a trample and shuffle of many feet passed over my head as
+the weird crew pulled and hauled.  The _Elsinore_ continued to heel over
+until I could see the water against my port, and then she gathered way
+and dashed ahead at such a rate that I could hear the stinging and
+singing of the foam through the circle of thick glass beside me.
+
+The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after, when
+Wada served me breakfast and helped me dress.  He, too, complained of
+inability to sleep.  He had been bunked with Nancy in one of the rooms in
+the 'midship-house.  Wada described the situation.  The tiny room, made
+of steel, was air-tight when the steel door was closed.  And Nancy
+insisted on keeping the door closed.  As a result Wada, in the upper
+bunk, had stifled.  He told me that the air had got so bad that the flame
+of the lamp, no matter how high it was turned, guttered down and all but
+refused to burn.  Nancy snored beautifully through it all, while he had
+been unable to close his eyes.
+
+"He is not clean," quoth Wada.  "He is a pig.  No more will I sleep in
+that place."
+
+On the poop I found the _Elsinore_, with many of her sails furled,
+slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky.  Also I
+found Mr. Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours
+before, and it took quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he had
+had the watch off between four and eight.  Even then, he told me, he had
+slept from four until half-past seven.
+
+"That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . . which
+means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience."
+
+And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that that
+alien thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.
+
+In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible.  Miss West
+did not appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the curse of
+sea-sickness had not been added.
+
+Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place for
+himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the corner with
+a solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.
+
+It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain and
+a persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of water
+across the deck.  With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which gave
+for'ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors, whenever
+they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and through by
+the boarding seas.  Several times I saw some of them taken off their feet
+and rolled about in the creaming foam.  And yet, erect, unstaggering,
+with certitude of weight and strength, among these rolled men, these
+clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire.  They
+were never taken off their feet.  They never shrank away from a splash of
+spray or heavier bulk of down-falling water.  They had fed on different
+food, were informed with a different spirit, were of iron in contrast
+with the poor miserables they drove to their bidding.
+
+In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in the
+cabin.  Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I could have
+slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble.  Captain West,
+stretched out on the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet slippers, slept
+enviably.  By some instinct, I might say, in the deep of sleep, he kept
+his place and was not rolled off upon the floor.  Also, he lightly held a
+half-smoked cigar in one hand.  I watched him for an hour, and knew him
+to be asleep, and marvelled that he maintained his easy posture and did
+not drop the cigar.
+
+After dinner there was no phonograph.  The second dog-watch was Mr.
+Pike's on deck.  Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too severe.  It
+would make the needle jump and scratch his beloved records.
+
+And no sleep!  Another weary night of torment, and another dreary,
+overcast day and leaden, troubled sea.  And no Miss West.  Wada, too, is
+sea-sick, although heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend on me
+with glassy, unseeing eyes.  I sent him to his bunk, and read through the
+endless hours until my eyes were tired, and my brain, between lack of
+sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.
+
+Captain West is no conversationalist.  The more I see of him the more I
+am baffled.  I have not yet found a reason for that first impression I
+received of him.  He has all the poise and air of a remote and superior
+being, and yet I wonder if it be not poise and air and nothing else.  Just
+as I had expected, that first meeting, ere he spoke a word, to hear fall
+from his lips words of untold beneficence and wisdom, and then heard him
+utter mere social commonplaces, so I now find myself almost forced to
+conclude that his touch of race, and beak of power, and all the tall,
+aristocratic slenderness of him have nothing behind them.
+
+And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that first
+impression.  He has not shown any strength, but by the same token he has
+not shown any weakness.  Sometimes I wonder what resides behind those
+clear blue eyes.  Certainly I have failed to find any intellectual
+backing.  I tried him out with William James' _Varieties of Religious
+Experience_.  He glanced at a few pages, then returned it to me with the
+frank statement that it did not interest him.  He has no books of his
+own.  Evidently he is not a reader.  Then what is he?  I dared to feel
+him out on politics.  He listened courteously, said sometimes yes and
+sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very discouragement, said nothing.
+
+Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still more
+aloof from his officers.  I have not seen him address a further word to
+Mr. Mellaire than "Good morning" on the poop.  As for Mr. Pike, who eats
+three times a day with him, scarcely any more conversation obtains
+between them.  And I am surprised by what seems the very conspicuous awe
+with which Mr. Pike seems to regard his commander.
+
+Another thing.  What are Captain West's duties?  So far he has done
+nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day
+stroll a total of one mile around the poop.  The mates do all the work,
+and hard work it is, four hours on deck and four below, day and night
+with never a variation.  I watch Captain West and am amazed.  He will
+loll back in the cabin and stare straight before him for hours at a time,
+until I am almost frantic to demand of him what are his thoughts.
+Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all.  I give him up.  I cannot
+fathom him.
+
+Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across the
+deck.  I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with five
+thousand tons of coal around the Horn is more serious than I had thought.
+So deep is the _Elsinore_ in the water that she is like a log awash.  Her
+tall, six-foot bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas from boarding her.
+She has not the buoyancy one is accustomed to ascribe to ships.  On the
+contrary, she is weighted down until she is dead, so that, for this one
+day alone, I am appalled at the thought of how many thousands of tons of
+the North Atlantic have boarded her and poured out through her spouting
+scuppers and clanging ports.
+
+Yes, a depressing day.  The two mates have alternated on deck and in
+their bunks.  Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the Bible.
+Miss West is still sea-sick.  I have tired myself out with reading, and
+the fuzziness of my unsleeping brain makes for melancholy.  Even Wada is
+anything but a cheering spectacle, crawling out of his bunk, as he does
+at stated intervals, and with sick, glassy eyes trying to discern what my
+needs may be.  I almost wish I could get sea-sick myself.  I had never
+dreamed that a sea voyage could be so unenlivening as this one is
+proving.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the _Elsinore_,
+under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from her
+scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic.  And I
+have failed to sleep half-an-hour all told.  At this rate, in a very
+short time I shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the ship.  I
+never have had hives like these before.  I can't understand it.  So long
+as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled.  The instant I put
+out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and the lumps on my
+skin begin to form.
+
+Miss West may be sea-sick, but she cannot be comatose, because at
+frequent intervals she sends the steward to me with more cream of tartar.
+
+I have had a revelation to-day.  I have discovered Captain West.  He is a
+Samurai.--You remember the Samurai that H.  G.  Wells describes in his
+_Modern Utopia_--the superior breed of men who know things and are
+masters of life and of their fellow-men in a super-benevolent, super-wise
+way?  Well, that is what Captain West is.  Let me tell it to you.
+
+We had a shift of wind to-day.  In the height of a south-west gale the
+wind shifted, in the instant, eight points, which is equivalent to a
+quarter of the circle.  Imagine it!  Imagine a gale howling from out of
+the south-west.  And then imagine the wind, in a heavier and more violent
+gale, abruptly smiting you from the north-west.  We had been sailing
+through a circular storm, Captain West vouchsafed to me, before the
+event, and the wind could be expected to box the compass.
+
+Clad in sea-boots, oilskins and sou'wester, I had for some time been
+hanging upon the rail at the break of the poop, staring down fascinated
+at the poor devils of sailors, repeatedly up to their necks in water, or
+submerged, or dashed like straws about the deck, while they pulled and
+hauled, stupidly, blindly, and in evident fear, under the orders of Mr.
+Pike.
+
+Mr. Pike was with them, working them and working with them.  He took
+every chance they took, yet somehow he escaped being washed off his feet,
+though several times I saw him entirely buried from view.  There was more
+than luck in the matter; for I saw him, twice, at the head of a line of
+the men, himself next to the pin.  And twice, in this position, I saw the
+North Atlantic curl over the rail and fall upon them.  And each time he
+alone remained, holding the turn of the rope on the pin, while the rest
+of them were rolled and sprawled helplessly away.
+
+Almost it seemed to me good fun, as at a circus, watching their antics.
+But I did not apprehend the seriousness of the situation until, the wind
+screaming higher than ever and the sea a-smoke and white with wrath, two
+men did not get up from the deck.  One was carried away for'ard with a
+broken leg--it was Iare Jacobson, a dull-witted Scandinavian; and the
+other, Kid Twist, was carried away, unconscious, with a bleeding scalp.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not
+break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape
+being blown away.  My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving
+spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out
+of my sleep-starved brain.
+
+And all the time, slender, aristocratic, graceful in streaming oilskins,
+in apparent unconcern, giving no orders, effortlessly accommodating his
+body to the violent rolling of the _Elsinore_, Captain West strolled up
+and down.
+
+It was at this stage in the gale that he unbent sufficiently to tell me
+that we were going through a circular storm and that the wind was boxing
+the compass.  I did notice that he kept his gaze pretty steadily fixed on
+the overcast, cloud-driven sky.  At last, when it seemed the wind could
+not possibly blow more fiercely, he found in the sky what he sought.  It
+was then that I first heard his voice--a sea-voice, clear as a bell,
+distinct as silver, and of an ineffable sweetness and volume, as it might
+be the trump of Gabriel.  That voice!--effortless, dominating!  The
+mighty threat of the storm, made articulate by the resistance of the
+_Elsinore_, shouted in all the stays, bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed
+the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the myriad tiny ropes
+far aloft evoked a devil's chorus of shrill pipings and screechings.  And
+yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain West's voice, as of a
+spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all music and mighty as
+an archangel's call to judgment.  And it carried understanding and
+command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep in the wash
+of sea below us.  And the man at the wheel obeyed, and Mr. Pike obeyed,
+barking and snarling orders to the poor wallowing devils who wallowed on
+and obeyed him in turn.  And as the voice was the face.  This face I had
+never seen before.  It was the face of the spirit visitant, chaste with
+wisdom, lighted by a splendour of power and calm.  Perhaps it was the
+calm that smote me most of all.  It was as the calm of one who had
+crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men with the word that all was well.
+It was not the face of the fighter.  To my thrilled imagination it was
+the face of one who dwelt beyond all strivings of the elements and broody
+dissensions of the blood.
+
+The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings of
+the storm, directing the gigantic, labouring _Elsinore_ in all her
+intricate massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will, which
+was the will of wisdom.
+
+And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his
+creatures laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more
+slenderly tall and aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins,
+Captain West touched my shoulder and pointed astern over our weather
+quarter.  I looked, and all that I could see was a vague smoke of sea and
+air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at the ocean's breast.  And at the
+same moment the gale from the south-west ceased.  There was no gale, no
+moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.
+
+"What is it?" I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation of
+wind.
+
+"The shift," he said.  "There she comes."
+
+And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an atmospheric
+impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the _Elsinore_ harp
+protest.  It forced me down on the rail.  I was like a windle-straw.  As
+I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the air back into my lungs,
+so that I suffocated and turned my head aside to breathe in the lee of
+the draught.  The man at the wheel again listened to the Gabriel voice;
+and Mr. Pike, on the deck below, listened and repeated the will of the
+voice; and Captain West, in slender and stately balance, leaned into the
+face of the wind and slowly paced the deck.
+
+It was magnificent.  Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and the
+men who overlord the sea.  Captain West had vindicated himself, exposited
+himself.  At the height and crisis of storm he had taken charge of the
+_Elsinore_, and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was all he was, the
+foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves, serving the one
+from beyond--the Samurai.
+
+A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily
+into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back against
+it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on the knob of
+the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the storm-white sea
+and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.
+
+Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and
+saw him.  Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet
+slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather chair
+smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing--or, if they
+saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my ken.  I
+have developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I know him
+less than the little I thought I knew him before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this, which
+has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the selectest
+and most mountainous brands of cross-seas.  The way the poor _Elsinore_
+pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts
+and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing.  To
+me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I
+now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and
+that the _Elsinore_ is well-loaded because he saw to it himself.
+
+He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in order
+to watch her in her maddest antics.  The sight is very pleasant to him,
+for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face and
+impart to it a hint of ecstasy.  The _Elsinore_ has a snug place in his
+heart, I am confident.  He calls her behaviour admirable, and at such
+times will repeat to me that it was he who saw to her loading.
+
+It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on
+the sea, to the motion of the sea.  There _is_ a rhythm to this chaos of
+crossing, buffeting waves.  I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve
+it.  But Mr. Pike _knows_ it.  Again and again, as we paced up and down
+this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he
+would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the _Elsinore_ smashed down
+on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that seemed
+never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt, snap-of-the-whip
+effect as she began the corresponding roll to windward.  In vain I strove
+to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these antics, and I am driven to believe
+that he does not consciously forecast them at all.  He _feels_ them; he
+knows them.  They, and the sea, are ingrained in him.
+
+Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
+shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw.  If ever, in an
+hour, the _Elsinore_ had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had
+not noticed it.  So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next
+moment the _Elsinore_ had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred
+feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the
+deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the chart-house.
+My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet.  Now how did he know?
+
+And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away.  On the
+contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and again
+he lent his surplus to me.  I begin to have more respect, not for the
+sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of seamen that
+are as slaves on our decks, but for the real seamen who are their
+masters--for Captain West, for Mr. Pike, yes, and for Mr. Mellaire,
+dislike him as I do.
+
+As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back to
+the south-west.  Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and
+reported the change to Captain West.
+
+"We'll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst," the second mate told me when he
+came back.  "You'll find it an interesting manoeuvre."
+
+"But why wait till four?" I asked.
+
+"The Captain's orders, sir.  The watches will be changing, and we'll have
+the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the watch below by
+calling it out now."
+
+And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins, came
+out of the chart-house.  Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took charge of the
+many men who, on deck and on the poop, were to manage the mizzen-braces,
+while Mr. Mellaire went for'ard with his watch to handle the fore-and
+main-braces.  It was a pretty manoeuvre, a play of leverages, by which
+they cased the force of the wind on the after part of the _Elsinore_ and
+used the force of the wind on the for'ard part.
+
+Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite
+oblivious of what was being done.  He was again the favoured passenger,
+taking a stroll for his health's sake.  And yet I knew that both his
+officers were uncomfortably aware of his presence and were keyed to their
+finest seamanship.  I know, now, Captain West's position on board.  He is
+the brains of the _Elsinore_.  He is the master strategist.  There is
+more in directing a ship on the ocean than in standing watches and
+ordering men to pull and haul.  They are pawns, and the two officers are
+pieces, with which Captain West plays the game against sea, and wind, and
+season, and ocean current.  He is the knower.  They are his tongue, by
+which he makes his knowledge articulate.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A bad night--equally bad for the _Elsinore_ and for me.  She is receiving
+a sharp buffeting at the hands of the wintry North Atlantic.  I fell
+asleep early, exhausted from lack of sleep, and awoke in an hour, frantic
+with my lumped and burning skin.  More cream of tartar, more reading,
+more vain attempts to sleep, until shortly before five, when the steward
+brought me my coffee, I wrapped myself in my dressing-gown, and like a
+being distracted prowled into the cabin.  I dozed in a leather chair and
+was thrown out by a violent roll of the ship.  I tried the sofa, sinking
+to sleep immediately, and immediately thereafter finding myself
+precipitated to the floor.  I am convinced that when Captain West naps on
+the sofa he is only half asleep.  How else can he maintain so precarious
+a position?--unless, in him, too, the sea and its motion be ingrained.
+
+I wandered into the dining-room, wedged myself into a screwed chair, and
+fell asleep, my head on my arms, my arms on the table.  And at quarter
+past seven the steward roused me by shaking my shoulders.  It was time to
+set table.
+
+Heavy with the brief heaviness of sleep I had had, I dressed and stumbled
+up on to the poop in the hope that the wind would clear my brain.  Mr.
+Pike had the watch, and with sure, age-lagging step he paced the deck.
+The man is a marvel--sixty-nine years old, a life of hardship, and as
+sturdy as a lion.  Yet of the past night alone his hours had been: four
+to six in the afternoon on deck; eight to twelve on deck; and four to
+eight in the morning on deck.  In a few minutes he would be relieved, but
+at midday he would again be on deck.
+
+I leaned on the poop-rail and stared for'ard along the dreary waste of
+deck.  Every port and scupper was working to ease the weight of North
+Atlantic that perpetually fell on board.  Between the rush of the
+cascades, streaks of rust showed everywhere.  Some sort of a wooden pin-
+rail had carried away on the starboard-rail at the foot of the mizzen-
+shrouds, and an amazing raffle of ropes and tackles washed about.  Here
+Nancy and half-a-dozen men worked sporadically, and in fear of their
+lives, to clear the tangle.
+
+The long-suffering bleakness was very pronounced on Nancy's face, and
+when the walls of water, in impending downfall, reared above the
+_Elsinore's_ rail, he was always the first to leap for the life-line
+which had been stretched fore and aft across the wide space of deck.
+
+The rest of the men were scarcely less backward in dropping their work
+and springing to safety--if safety it might be called, to grip a rope in
+both hands and have legs sweep out from under, and be wrenched
+full-length upon the boiling surface of an ice-cold flood.  Small wonder
+they look wretched.  Bad as their condition was when they came aboard at
+Baltimore, they look far worse now, what of the last several days of wet
+and freezing hardship.
+
+From time to time, completing his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike
+would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what
+happened to the poor devils below.  The man's heart is callous.  A thing
+of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these
+creatures who lack his own excessive iron.
+
+I noticed the stone-deaf man, the twisted oaf whose face I have described
+as being that of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun.  His bright,
+liquid, pain-filled eyes were more filled with pain than ever, his face
+still more lean and drawn with suffering.  And yet his face showed an
+excess of nervousness, sensitiveness, and a pathetic eagerness to please
+and do.  I could not help observing that, despite his dreadful
+sense-handicap and his wrecked, frail body, he did the most work, was
+always the last of the group to spring to the life-line and always the
+first to loose the life-line and slosh knee-deep or waist-deep through
+the churning water to attack the immense and depressing tangle of rope
+and tackle.
+
+I remarked to Mr. Pike that the men seemed thinner and weaker than when
+they came on board, and he delayed replying for a moment while he stared
+down at them with that cattle-buyer's eye of his.
+
+"Sure they are," he said disgustedly.  "A weak breed, that's what they
+are--nothing to build on, no stamina.  The least thing drags them down.
+Why, in my day we grew fat on work like that--only we didn't; we worked
+so hard there wasn't any chance for fat.  We kept in fighting trim, that
+was all.  But as for this scum and slum--say, you remember, Mr. Pathurst,
+that man I spoke to the first day, who said his name was Charles Davis?"
+
+"The one you thought there was something the matter with?"
+
+"Yes, and there was, too.  He's in that 'midship room with the Greek now.
+He'll never do a tap of work the whole Voyage.  He's a hospital case, if
+there ever was one.  Talk about shot to pieces!  He's got holes in him I
+could shove my fist through.  I don't know whether they're perforating
+ulcers, or cancers, or cannon-shot wounds, or what not.  And he had the
+nerve to tell me they showed up after he came on board!"
+
+"And he had them all the time?" I asked.
+
+"All the time!  Take my word, Mr. Pathurst, they're years old.  But he's
+a wonder.  I watched him those first days, sent him aloft, had him down
+in the fore-hold trimming a few tons of coal, did everything to him, and
+he never showed a wince.  Being up to the neck in the salt water finally
+fetched him, and now he's reported off duty--for the voyage.  And he'll
+draw his wages for the whole time, have all night in, and never do a tap.
+Oh, he's a hot one to have passed over on us, and the _Elsinore's_
+another man short."
+
+"Another!" I exclaimed.  "Is the Greek going to die?"
+
+"No fear.  I'll have him steering in a few days.  I refer to the misfits.
+If we rolled a dozen of them together they wouldn't make one real man.
+I'm not saying it to alarm you, for there's nothing alarming about it;
+but we're going to have proper hell this voyage."  He broke off to stare
+reflectively at his broken knuckles, as if estimating how much drive was
+left in them, then sighed and concluded, "Well, I can see I've got my
+work cut out for me."
+
+Sympathizing with Mr. Pike is futile; the only effect is to make his mood
+blacker.  I tried it, and he retaliated with:
+
+"You oughta see the bloke with curvature of the spine in Mr. Mellaire's
+watch.  He's a proper hobo, too, and a land lubber, and don't weigh
+more'n a hundred pounds, and must be fifty years old, and he's got
+curvature of the spine, and he's able seaman, if you please, on the
+_Elsinore_.  And worse than all that, he puts it over on you; he's nasty,
+he's mean, he's a viper, a wasp.  He ain't afraid of anything because he
+knows you dassent hit him for fear of croaking him.  Oh, he's a pearl of
+purest ray serene, if anybody should slide down a backstay and ask you.
+If you fail to identify him any other way, his name is Mulligan Jacobs."
+
+* * * * *
+
+After breakfast, again on deck, in Mr. Mellaire's watch, I discovered
+another efficient.  He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular man
+of say forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big eagle-
+face, swarthy, with keen, intelligent black eyes.
+
+Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the best
+sailor in his watch, a proper seaman.  When he referred to the man as the
+Maltese Cockney, and I asked why, he replied:
+
+"First, because he is Maltese, Mr. Pathurst; and next, because he talks
+Cockney like a native.  And depend upon it, he heard Bow Bells before he
+lisped his first word."
+
+"And has O'Sullivan bought Andy Fay's sea-boots yet?" I queried.
+
+It was at this moment that Miss West emerged upon the poop.  She was as
+rosy and vital as ever, and certainly, if she had been sea-sick, she flew
+no signals of it.  As she came toward me, greeting me, I could not help
+remarking again the lithe and springy limb-movement with which she
+walked, and her fine, firm skin.  Her neck, free in a sailor collar, with
+white sweater open at the throat, seemed almost redoubtably strong to my
+sleepless, jaundiced eyes.  Her hair, under a white knitted cap, was
+smooth and well-groomed.  In fact, the totality of impression she
+conveyed was of a well-groomedness one would not expect of a
+sea-captain's daughter, much less of a woman who had been sea-sick.
+Life!--that is the key of her, the essential note of her--life and
+health.  I'll wager she has never entertained a morbid thought in that
+practical, balanced, sensible head of hers.
+
+"And how have you been?" she asked, then rattled on with sheer exuberance
+ere I could answer.  "Had a lovely night's sleep.  I was really over my
+sickness yesterday, but I just devoted myself to resting up.  I slept ten
+solid hours--what do you think of that?"
+
+"I wish I could say the same," I replied with appropriate dejection, as I
+swung in beside her, for she had evinced her intention of promenading.
+
+"Oh, then you've been sick?"
+
+"On the contrary," I answered dryly.  "And I wish I had been.  I haven't
+had five hours' sleep all told since I came on board.  These pestiferous
+hives. . . "
+
+I held up a lumpy wrist to show.  She took one glance at it, halted
+abruptly, and, neatly balancing herself to the roll, took my wrist in
+both her hands and gave it close scrutiny.
+
+"Mercy!" she cried; and then began to laugh.
+
+I was of two minds.  Her laughter was delightful to the ear, there was
+such a mellowness, and healthiness, and frankness about it.  On the other
+hand, that it should be directed at my misfortune was exasperating.  I
+suppose my perplexity showed in my face, for when she had eased her
+laughter and looked at me with a sobering countenance, she immediately
+went off into more peals.
+
+"You poor child," she gurgled at last.  "And when I think of all the
+cream of tartar I made you consume!"
+
+It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to
+take advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain just
+how many years she was my junior.  She had told me she was twelve years
+old the time the _Dixie_ collided with the river steamer in San Francisco
+Bay.  Very well, all I had to do was to ascertain the date of that
+disaster and I had her.  But in the meantime she laughed at me and my
+hives.
+
+"I suppose it is--er--humorous, in some sort of way," I said a bit
+stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss
+West, for it only set her off into more laughter.
+
+"What you needed," she announced, with fresh gurglings, "was an exterior
+treatment."
+
+"Don't tell me I've got the chicken-pox or the measles," I protested.
+
+"No."  She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another
+paroxysm.  "What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . "
+
+She paused deliberately, and looked me straight the eyes.
+
+"Of bedbugs," she concluded.  And then, all seriousness and practicality,
+she went on: "But we'll have that righted in a jiffy.  I'll turn the
+_Elsinore's_ after-quarters upside down, though I know there are none in
+father's room or mine.  And though this is my first voyage with Mr. Pike
+I know he's too hard-bitten" (here I laughed at her involuntary pun) "an
+old sailor not to know that his room is clean.  Yours" (I was perturbed
+for fear she was going to say that I had brought them on board) "have
+most probably drifted in from for'ard.  They always have them for'ard.
+
+"And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case.  You'd
+better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you.  The next couple
+of nights you'll spend in the cabin or chart-room.  And be sure Wada
+removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from your rooms.
+There's going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing out of woodwork,
+and rebuilding.  Trust me.  I know the vermin."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Such a cleaning up and turning over!  For two nights, one in the chart-
+room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep, and I am
+now almost stupid with excess of sleep.  The land seems very far away.  By
+some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or months, have
+passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March morning.  And yet it
+was March 28, and this is only the first week in April.
+
+I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West.  She is the
+most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered.  What
+passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she
+was convinced that he was not the erring one.  In some strange way, my
+two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of
+vermin.  Under Miss West's instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all
+superficial woodwork have been ripped out.  She worked the carpenter from
+daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of the
+sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches on the
+cleansing operations.  The carpenter is now busy rebuilding my rooms.
+Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days I expect to be
+settled back in my quarters.
+
+Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been
+four.  Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to
+the work.  The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name,
+is an interesting fellow.  I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West
+sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.
+
+This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea.  How he
+happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not
+explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
+_Elsinore_.  But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
+the sea.  He is a small man, but most powerfully built.  His shoulders
+are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and yet he is
+slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked.  This last, however, is
+not due to sickness or ill-health.  Tyro as he is on the sea, Steve
+Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked.  He has a way of
+looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet it
+is at such moments I get most strongly the impression of crookedness.  But
+he is a man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned with.  In ways he
+suggests a kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a
+prejudice against--Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  And I have
+already noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve
+Roberts chums.
+
+The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work
+for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature
+of the spine.  But before she sent him packing other things occurred in
+which I was concerned.  I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first came
+in to go to work, and I could not help observing the startled, avid
+glance he threw at my big shelves of books.  He advanced on them in the
+way a robber might advance on a secret hoard of gold, and as a miser
+would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these book-titles with his
+eyes.
+
+And such eyes!  All time bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the
+man possessed was there in his eyes.  They were small, pale-blue, and
+gimlet-pointed with fire.  His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to
+ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils.  The man
+was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in learning that he
+hated all things except books.
+
+"Would you care to read some of them?" I said hospitably.
+
+All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head
+to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
+
+"It's hell, ain't it?--you with a strong body and servants to carry for
+you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts the
+pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?"
+
+How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he uttered
+these words?  I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the hall past
+my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety.  Being alone in
+the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were locked in a cage
+with a tiger-cat.  The devilishness, the wickedness, and, above all, the
+pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me and addressed me, were
+most unpleasant.  I swear I knew fear--not calculated caution, not timid
+apprehension, but blind, panic, unreasoned terror.  The malignancy of the
+creature was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it
+poured from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his
+withered, twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked
+talons of hands.  And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
+repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take the
+throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
+malformed life out of it.
+
+But there was little encouragement in such thought--no more than a man
+might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush
+them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison
+into him.  And so with this Mulligan Jacobs.  My fear of him was the fear
+of being infected with his venom.  I could not help it; for I caught a
+quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his mouth
+sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid,
+destroying me.
+
+One thing was very clear.  In the creature was no fear.  Absolutely, he
+did not know fear.  He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads
+underfoot in nightmares.  Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a
+nightmare.
+
+"You suffer pain often?" I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by the
+calculated use of sympathy.
+
+"The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an' burn,"
+was his reply.  "But by what damnable right do you have all these books,
+and time to read 'em, an' all night in to read 'em, an' soak in them,
+when me brain's on fire, and I'm watch and watch, an' me broken spine
+won't let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?"
+
+Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
+modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what
+were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the
+writers he preferred.  His library, he told me, among other things
+included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron.  Next was a complete
+Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume.  A full hall-dozen
+he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood
+Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of Zola.
+Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime favourite.
+
+He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently mad
+from any madman I had ever encountered.  I talked on with him about books
+and bookmen.  He was most universal and particular.  He liked O.  Henry.
+George Moore was a cad and a four--flusher.  Edgar Saltus' _Anatomy of
+Negation_ was profounder than Kant.  Maeterlinck was a mystic frump.
+Emerson was a charlatan.  Ibsen's _Ghosts_ was the stuff, though Ibsen
+was a bourgeois lickspittler.  Heine was the real goods.  He preferred
+Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the
+best of the Russian boiling.  John Masefield knew what he was writing
+about, and Joseph Conrad was living too fat to turn out the stuff he
+first turned out.
+
+And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had
+ever heard.  I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology.
+Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist.  On
+the other hand, political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism
+and quietism.  Political socialism had gone to pot, while industrial
+unionism was the logical culmination of Marxism.  He was a direct
+actionist.  The mass strike was the thing.  Sabotage, not merely as a
+withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen destruction-of-profits policy,
+was the weapon.  Of course he believed in the propaganda of the deed, but
+a man was a fool to talk about it.  His job was to do it and keep his
+mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence.  Of course,
+_he_ talked; but what of it?  Didn't he have curvature of the spine?  He
+didn't care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried to give it to
+him.
+
+And while he talked he hated me.  He seemed to hate the things he talked
+about and espoused.  I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was
+patent that he was self-educated.  When I asked him how it was he had
+come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as hot one place
+as another.  He unbent enough to tell me that he had been an athlete,
+when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer in Eastern Canada.  And
+then his disease had come upon him, and for a quarter of a century he had
+been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of a personal
+acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any man that
+ever existed.
+
+It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
+doorway.  He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour look
+of disapprobation.  Mr. Pike's countenance is almost petrified.  Any
+expression seems to crack it--with the exception of sourness.  But when
+Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all.  His
+hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness.  Evidently he
+condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs's time.  To Mulligan Jacobs he
+said in his customary snarl:
+
+"Go on an' get to your work.  Chew the rag in your watch below."
+
+And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs.  The venom of hatred I had
+already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was
+manifested.  I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather,
+did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.
+
+"Aw, go to hell, you old stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+If ever I had seen murder in a man's eyes, I saw it then in the mate's.
+He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open but
+clenched.  One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all the
+poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
+darkness.  But he was unafraid.  Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake
+on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant.
+More than that.  He even thrust his face forward on its twisted neck to
+meet the blow.
+
+It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that frail,
+crippled, repulsive thing.
+
+"It's me that can call you the stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.  "I ain't no
+Larry.  G'wan an' hit me.  Why don't you hit me?"
+
+And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature.  He, whose whole
+career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, could
+not strike this fractured splinter of a man.  I swear that Mr. Pike
+actually struggled with himself to strike.  I saw it.  But he could not.
+
+"Go on to your work," he ordered.  "The voyage is young yet, Mulligan.
+I'll have you eatin' outa my hand before it's over."
+
+And Mulligan Jacobs's face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
+neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
+into incandescence.  So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that
+consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it.  All he could do
+was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should not have been
+surprised had he spat poison in the mate's face.
+
+And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
+beaten.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I can't get it out of my mind.  The picture of the mate and the cripple
+facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids.  This is different
+from the books and from what I know of existence.  It is revelation.  Life
+is a profoundly amazing thing.  What is this bitter flame that informs
+Mulligan Jacobs?  How dare he--with no hope of any profit, not a hero,
+not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to God, but a mere filthy,
+malignant rat--how dare he, I ask myself, be so defiant, so
+death-inviting?  The spectacle of him makes me doubt all the schools of
+the metaphysicians and the realists.  No philosophy has a leg to stand on
+that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs.  And all the midnight oil of
+philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan
+Jacobs . . . unless he be insane.  And then I don't know.
+
+Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans
+with whom I am herded on the _Elsinore_?
+
+* * * * *
+
+And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is another
+one of them.  I have learned his name.  It is Arthur Deacon.  He is the
+pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the men were
+routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass--the man I so instantly
+adjudged a drug-fiend.  He certainly looks it.
+
+I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.
+
+"White slaver," was his answer.  "Had to skin outa New York to save his
+skin.  He'll be consorting with those other three larrakins I gave a
+piece of my mind to."
+
+"And what do you make of them?" I asked.
+
+"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
+committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin' for
+'em right now.  I'd like to have the cash somebody's put up in New York
+to send them on this get-away.  Oh, I know the breed."
+
+"Gangsters?" I queried.
+
+"That's what.  But I'll trim their dirty hides.  I'll trim 'em.  Mr.
+Pathurst, this voyage ain't started yet, and this old stiff's a long way
+from his last legs.  I'll give them a run for their money.  Why, I've
+buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft.  And I'll bury
+some of them that think me an old stiff."
+
+He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst, I've heard you're a writing man.  And when they told me at
+the agents' you were going along passenger, I made a point of going to
+see your play.  Now I'm not saying anything about that play, one way or
+the other.  But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you'll get
+stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage.  Hell's going to pop,
+believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that'll do a lot of
+the poppin'.  Some several and plenty's going to learn who's an old
+stiff."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+How I have been sleeping!  This relief of renewed normality is
+delicious--thanks to Miss West.  Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
+Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me?  And then there
+was Wada.  But no; it required Miss West.  Again I contemplate the
+problem of woman.  It is just such an incident among a million others
+that keeps the thinker's gaze fixed on woman.  They truly are the mothers
+and the conservers of the race.
+
+Rail as I will at Miss West's red-blood complacency of life, yet I must
+bow my head to her life-giving to me.  Practical, sensible, hard-headed,
+a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing
+attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must
+confess I am most grateful that she is along.  Had she not been on the
+_Elsinore_, by this time I should have been so overwrought from lack of
+sleep that I would be biting my veins and howling--as mad a hatter as any
+of our cargo of mad hatters.  And so we come to it--the everlasting
+mystery of woman.  One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it
+patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her.  But,
+regarding Miss West, I do entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she is
+not a suffragette.  That would be too much.
+
+Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human.  He was really a bit
+fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he regretted
+the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms.  It seems he has a
+keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on the _Elsinore_, and
+that, although he is oblivious of the existence of the crew, he is not
+oblivious of my comfort.  By his few expressions of regret it appears
+that he cannot forgive himself for his careless acceptance of the
+erroneous diagnosis of my affliction.  Yes; Captain West is a real human
+man.  Is he not the father of the slender-faced, strapping-bodied Miss
+West?
+
+"Thank goodness that's settled," was Miss West's exclamation this
+morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how gloriously
+I had slept.
+
+And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all
+practical purposes--it was settled, she next said:
+
+"Come on and see the chickens."
+
+And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the 'midship-
+house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat hens in the
+ship's chicken-coop.
+
+As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait of
+hers as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming down on
+the tug from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor require to
+be entertained.
+
+_Come and see the chickens_!--Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of that
+simple invitation!  For effrontery of possessiveness is there anything
+that can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female, human
+woman?--_Come and see the chickens_!  Oh, well, the sailors for'ard may
+be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here, aft, is one male
+passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an equally hard-bitten
+adventurer on the sea of matrimony.  When I go over the census I remember
+at least several women, superior to Miss West, who trilled their song of
+sex and failed to shipwreck me.
+
+As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of the
+sea has stolen into my mental processes.  Involuntarily I think in terms
+of the sea.  Another thing I notice is my excessive use of superlatives.
+But then, everything on board the _Elsinore_ is superlative.  I find
+myself continually combing my vocabulary in quest of just and adequate
+words.  Yet am I aware of failure.  For example, all the words of all the
+dictionaries would fail to approximate the exceeding terribleness of
+Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+But to return to the chickens.  Despite every precaution, it was evident
+that they had had a hard time during the past days of storm.  It was
+equally evident that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness, had not
+neglected them.  Under her directions the steward had actually installed
+a small oil-stove in the big coop, and she now beckoned him up to the top
+of the house as he was passing for'ard to the galley.  It was for the
+purpose of instructing him further in the matter of feeding them.
+
+Where were the grits?  They needed grits.  He didn't know.  The sack had
+been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had promised a
+couple of sailors that afternoon to overhaul the lazarette.
+
+"Plenty of ashes," she told the steward.  "Remember.  And if a sailor
+doesn't clean the coop each day, you report to me.  And give them only
+clean food--no spoiled scraps, mind.  How many eggs yesterday?"
+
+The steward's eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got nine
+the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.
+
+"The poor things," said Miss West--to me.  "You've no idea how bad
+weather reduces their laying."  She turned back upon the steward.  "Mind
+now, you watch and find out which hens don't lay, and kill them first.
+And you ask me each time before you kill one."
+
+I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while Miss
+West talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler.  But it gave me
+opportunity to observe her.  It is the length of her eyes that
+accentuates their steadiness of gaze--helped, of course, by the dark
+brows and lashes.  I noted again the warm gray of her eyes.  And I began
+to identify her, to locate her.  She is a physical type of the best of
+the womanhood of old New England.  Nothing spare nor meagre, nor bred
+out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one would call robust.
+When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred.  I must fall back on my
+other word, which will have to be the last: Miss West is vital-bodied.
+That is the key-word.
+
+When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I ventured
+my customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:
+
+"And has O'Sullivan bought Andy Fay's sea-boots yet?"
+
+"Not yet, Mr. Pathurst," was the reply, "though he nearly got them early
+this morning.  Come on along, sir, and I'll show you."
+
+Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along the
+bridge, across the 'midship-house and the for'ard-house.  From the edge
+of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two Japanese, with
+sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed bundle that
+unmistakably contained a human body.
+
+"O'Sullivan used a razor," said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"And that is Andy Fay?" I cried.
+
+"No, sir, not Andy.  That's a Dutchman.  Christian Jespersen was his name
+on the articles.  He got in O'Sullivan's way when O'Sullivan went after
+the boots.  That's what saved Andy.  Andy was more active.  Jespersen
+couldn't get out of his own way, much less out of O'Sullivan's.  There's
+Andy sitting over there."
+
+I followed Mr. Mellaire's gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
+Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe.  One arm was in a
+sling and his head was bandaged.  Beside him squatted Mulligan Jacobs.
+They were a pair.  Both were blue-eyed, and both were malevolent-eyed.
+And they were equally emaciated.  It was easy to see that they had
+discovered early in the voyage their kinship of bitterness.  Andy Fay, I
+knew, was sixty-three years old, although he looked a hundred; and
+Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty, made up for the difference by
+the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in his face and eyes.  I wondered
+if he sat beside the injured bitter one in some sense of sympathy, or if
+he were there in order to gloat.
+
+Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
+inevitable clown-grin.  One hand was swathed in bandages.
+
+"Must have kept Mr. Pike busy," was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till eight."
+
+"What?" I asked.  "Are there any more?"
+
+"One more, sir, a sheeny.  I didn't know his name before, but Mr. Pike
+got it--Isaac B. Chantz.  I never saw in all my life at sea as many
+sheenies as are on board the _Elsinore_ right now.  Sheenies don't take
+to the sea as a rule.  We've certainly got more than our share of them.
+Chantz isn't badly hurt, but you ought to hear him whimper."
+
+"Where's O'Sullivan?" I inquired.
+
+"In the 'midship-house with Davis, and without a mark.  Mr. Pike got into
+the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw.  And now he's lashed
+down and talking in a trance.  He's thrown the fear of God into Davis.
+Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike, threatening to brain
+O'Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and complaining that it's no way
+to run a hospital.  He'd have padded cells, straitjackets, night and day
+nurses, and violent wards, I suppose--and a convalescents' home in a
+Queen Anne cottage on the poop.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," Mr. Mellaire sighed.  "This is the funniest voyage
+and the funniest crew I've ever tackled.  It's not going to come to a
+good end.  Anybody can see that with half an eye.  It'll be dead of
+winter off the Horn, and a fo'c's'le full of lunatics and cripples to do
+the work.--Just take a look at that one.  Crazy as a bedbug.  He's likely
+to go overboard any time."
+
+I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung
+overboard the first day.  He had just come around the corner of the
+house, and, beyond one arm in a sling, seemed in good condition.  He
+walked easily and with strength, a testimonial to the virtues of Mr.
+Pike's rough surgery.
+
+My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian Jespersen,
+and to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor's shroud.  One
+of them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton and bandage.
+
+"Did he get hurt, too?" I asked.
+
+"No, sir.  He's the sail-maker.  They're both sail-makers.  He's a good
+one, too.  Yatsuda is his name.  But he's just had blood-poisoning and
+lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months.  He flatly refused to
+let them amputate.  He's all right now, but the hand is dead, all except
+the thumb and fore-finger, and he's teaching himself to sew with his left
+hand.  He's as clever a sail-maker as you'll find at sea."
+
+"A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination," I remarked.
+
+"It's put five men out of commission," Mr. Mellaire sighed.  "There's
+O'Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone, and Andy Fay, and
+Shorty, and the sheeny.  And the voyage not started yet.  And there's
+Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps--why, sir, we'll
+soon be that weak it'll take both watches to set a staysail."
+
+Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr. Mellaire, I
+was shocked--no; not because death was aboard with us.  I have stood by
+my philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or by murder.  What
+affected me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the affair.  Even
+murder--murder for cause--I can understand.  It is comprehensible that
+men should kill one another in the passion of love, of hatred, of
+patriotism, of religion.  But this was different.  Here was killing
+without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing monstrously
+irrational.
+
+Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the open
+door of the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O'Sullivan, and
+peeped in.  There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower bunk,
+rolling his eyes and raving.  In the top bunk, directly above, lay
+Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe.  I looked for the marlin-spike.
+There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him.
+
+"It's hell, ain't it, sir?" was his greeting.  "And how am I goin' to get
+any sleep with that baboon chattering away there.  He never lets up--keeps
+his chin-music goin' right along when he's asleep, only worse.  The way
+he grits his teeth is something awful.  Now I leave it to you, sir, is it
+right to put a crazy like that in with a sick man?  And I am a sick man."
+
+While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and halted
+just out of sight of the man in the bunk.  And the man talked on.
+
+"By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk.  It hurts me to crawl up here.
+It's inhumanity, that's what it is, and sailors at sea are better
+protected by the law than they used to be.  And I'll have you for a
+witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle."
+
+Mr. Pike stepped into the doorway.
+
+"Shut up, you damned sea-lawyer, you," he snarled.  "Haven't you played a
+dirty trick enough comin' on board this ship in your condition?  And if I
+have anything more out of you . . . "
+
+Mr. Pike was so angry that he could not complete the threat.  After
+spluttering for a moment he made a fresh attempt.
+
+"You . . . you . . . well, you annoy me, that's what you do."
+
+"I know the law, sir," Davis answered promptly.  "I worked full able
+seaman on this here ship.  All hands can testify to that.  I was aloft
+from the start.  Yes, sir, and up to my neck in salt water day and night.
+And you had me below trimmin' coal.  I did full duty and more, until this
+sickness got me--"
+
+"You were petrified and rotten before you ever saw this ship," Mr. Pike
+broke in.
+
+"The court'll decide that, sir," replied the imperturbable Davis.
+
+"And if you go to shoutin' off your sea-lawyer mouth," Mr. Pike
+continued, "I'll jerk you out of that and show you what real work is."
+
+"An' lay the owners open for lovely damages when we get in," Davis
+sneered.
+
+"Not if I bury you before we get in," was the mate's quick, grim retort.
+"And let me tell you, Davis, you ain't the first sea-lawyer I've dropped
+over the side with a sack of coal to his feet."
+
+Mr. Pike turned, with a final "Damned sea-lawyer!" and started along the
+deck.  I was walking behind him when he stopped abruptly.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst."
+
+Not as an officer to a passenger did he thus address me.  His tone was
+imperative, and I gave heed.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst.  From now on the less you see aboard this ship the better.
+That is all."
+
+And again he turned on his heel and went his way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+No, the sea is not a gentle place.  It must be the very hardness of the
+life that makes all sea-people hard.  Of course, Captain West is unaware
+that his crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never address the men
+save to give commands.  But Miss West, who is more like myself, a
+passenger, ignores the men.  She does not even say good-morning to the
+man at the wheel when she first comes on deck.  Nevertheless I shall, at
+least to the man at the wheel.  Am I not a passenger?
+
+Which reminds me.  Technically I am not a passenger.  The _Elsinore_ has
+no licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as third
+mate and am supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month.  Wada is
+down as cabin boy, although I paid a good price for his passage and he is
+my servant.
+
+Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead.  Within an hour
+after I had watched the sail-makers at work Christian Jespersen was slid
+overboard, feet first, a sack of coal to his feet to sink him.  It was a
+mild, calm day, and the _Elsinore_, logging a lazy two knots, was not
+hove to for the occasion.  At the last moment Captain West came for'ard,
+prayer-book in hand, read the brief service for burial at sea, and
+returned immediately aft.  It was the first time I had seen him for'ard.
+
+I shall not bother to describe the burial.  All I shall say of it is that
+it was as sordid as Christian Jespersen's life had been and as his death
+had been.
+
+As for Miss West, she sat in a deck-chair on the poop busily engaged with
+some sort of fancy work.  When Christian Jespersen and his coal splashed
+into the sea the crew immediately dispersed, the watch below going to its
+bunks, the watch on deck to its work.  Not a minute elapsed ere Mr.
+Mellaire was giving orders and the men were pulling and hauling.  So I
+returned to the poop to be unpleasantly impressed by Miss West's smiling
+unconcern.
+
+"Well, he's buried," I observed.
+
+"Oh," she said, with all the tonelessness of disinterest, and went on
+with her stitching.
+
+She must have sensed my frame of mind, for, after a moment, she paused
+from her sewing and looked at me.
+
+Your first sea funeral, Mr. Pathurst?
+
+"Death at sea does not seem to affect you," I said bluntly.
+
+"Not any more than on the land."  She shrugged her shoulders.  "So many
+people die, you know.  And when they are strangers to you . . . well,
+what do you do on the land when you learn that some workers have been
+killed in a factory you pass every day coming to town?  It is the same on
+the sea."
+
+"It's too bad we are a hand short," I said deliberately.
+
+It did not miss her.  Just as deliberately she replied:
+
+"Yes, isn't it?  And so early in the voyage, too."  She looked at me, and
+when I could not forbear a smile of appreciation she smiled back.
+
+"Oh, I know very well, Mr. Pathurst, that you think me a heartless
+wretch.  But it isn't that it's . . . it's the sea, I suppose.  And yet,
+I didn't know this man.  I don't remember ever having seen him.  At this
+stage of the voyage I doubt if I could pick out half-a-dozen of the
+sailors as men I had ever laid eyes on.  So why vex myself with even
+thinking of this stupid stranger who was killed by another stupid
+stranger?  As well might one die of grief with reading the murder columns
+of the daily papers."
+
+"And yet, it seems somehow different," I contended.
+
+"Oh, you'll get used to it," she assured me cheerfully, and returned to
+her sewing.
+
+I asked her if she had read Moody's _Ship of Souls_, but she had not.  I
+searched her out further.  She liked Browning, and was especially fond of
+_The Ring and the Book_.  This was the key to her.  She cared only for
+healthful literature--for the literature that exposits the vital lies of
+life.
+
+For instance, the mention of Schopenhauer produced smiles and laughter.
+To her all the philosophers of pessimism were laughable.  The red blood
+of her would not permit her to take them seriously.  I tried her out with
+a conversation I had had with De Casseres shortly before leaving New
+York.  De Casseres, after tracing Jules de Gaultier's philosophic
+genealogy back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had concluded with the
+proposition that out of their two formulas de Gaultier had constructed an
+even profounder formula.  The "Will-to-Live" of the one and the "Will-to-
+Power" of the other were, after all, only parts of de Gaultier's supreme
+generalization, the "Will-to-Illusion."
+
+I flatter myself that even De Casseres would have been pleased with the
+way I repeated his argument.  And when I had concluded it, Miss West
+promptly demanded if the realists might not be fooled by their own
+phrases as often and as completely as were the poor common mortals with
+the vital lies they never questioned.
+
+And there we were.  An ordinary young woman, who had never vexed her
+brains with ultimate problems, hears such things stated for the first
+time, and immediately, and with a laugh, sweeps them all away.  I doubt
+not that De Casseres would have agreed with her.
+
+"Do you believe in God?" I asked rather abruptly.  She dropped her sewing
+into her lap, looked at me meditatively, then gazed on and away across
+the flashing sea and up into the azure dome of sky.  And finally, with
+true feminine evasion, she replied:
+
+"My father does."
+
+"But you?" I insisted.
+
+"I really don't know.  I don't bother my head about such things.  I used
+to when I was a little girl.  And yet . . . yes, surely I believe in God.
+At times, when I am not thinking about it at all, I am very sure, and my
+faith that all is well is just as strong as the faith of your Jewish
+friend in the phrases of the philosophers.  That's all it comes to, I
+suppose, in every case--faith.  But, as I say, why bother?"
+
+"Ah, I have you now, Miss West!" I cried.  "You are a true daughter of
+Herodias."
+
+"It doesn't sound nice," she said with a _moue_.
+
+"And it isn't," I exulted.  "Nevertheless, it is what you are.  It is
+Arthur Symon's poem, _The Daughters of Herodias_.  Some day I shall read
+it to you, and you will answer.  I know you will answer that you, too,
+have looked often upon the stars."
+
+We had just got upon the subject of music, of which she possesses a
+surprisingly solid knowledge, and she was telling me that Debussy and his
+school held no particular charm for her, when Possum set up a wild
+yelping.
+
+The puppy had strayed for'ard along the bridge to the 'midship-house, and
+had evidently been investigating the chickens when his disaster came upon
+him.  So shrill was his terror that we both stood up.  He was dashing
+along the bridge toward us at full speed, yelping at every jump and
+continually turning his head back in the direction whence he came.
+
+I spoke to him and held out my hand, and was rewarded with a snap and
+clash of teeth as he scuttled past.  Still with head turned back, he went
+on along the poop.  Before I could apprehend his danger, Mr. Pike and
+Miss West were after him.  The mate was the nearer, and with a
+magnificent leap gained the rail just in time to intercept Possum, who
+was blindly going overboard under the slender railing.  With a sort of
+scooping kick Mr. Pike sent the animal rolling half across the poop.
+Howling and snapping more violently, Possum regained his feet and
+staggered on toward the opposite railing.
+
+"Don't touch him!" Mr. Pike cried, as Miss West showed her intention of
+catching the crazed little animal with her hands.  "Don't touch'm!  He's
+got a fit."
+
+But it did not deter her.  He was half-way under the railing when she
+caught him up and held him at arm's length while he howled and barked and
+slavered.
+
+"It's a fit," said Mr. Pike, as the terrier collapsed and lay on the deck
+jerking convulsively.
+
+"Perhaps a chicken pecked him," said Miss West.  "At any rate, get a
+bucket of water."
+
+"Better let me take him," I volunteered helplessly, for I was unfamiliar
+with fits.
+
+"No; it's all right," she answered.  "I'll take charge of him.  The cold
+water is what he needs.  He got too close to the coop, and a peck on the
+nose frightened him into the fit."
+
+"First time I ever heard of a fit coming that way," Mr. Pike remarked, as
+he poured water over the puppy under Miss West's direction.  "It's just a
+plain puppy fit.  They all get them at sea."
+
+"I think it was the sails that caused it," I argued.  "I've noticed that
+he is very afraid of them.  When they flap, he crouches down in terror
+and starts to run.  You noticed how he ran with his head turned back?"
+
+"I've seen dogs with fits do that when there was nothing to frighten
+them," Mr. Pike contended.
+
+"It was a fit, no matter what caused it," Miss West stated conclusively.
+"Which means that he has not been fed properly.  From now on I shall feed
+him.  You tell your boy that, Mr. Pathurst.  Nobody is to feed Possum
+anything without my permission."
+
+At this juncture Wada arrived with Possum's little sleeping box, and they
+prepared to take him below.
+
+"It was splendid of you, Miss West," I said, "and rash, as well, and I
+won't attempt to thank you.  But I tell you what-you take him.  He's your
+dog now."
+
+She laughed and shook her head as I opened the chart-house door for her
+to pass.
+
+"No; but I'll take care of him for you.  Now don't bother to come below.
+This is my affair, and you would only be in the way.  Wada will help me."
+
+And I was rather surprised, as I returned to my deck chair and sat down,
+to find how affected I was by the little episode.  I remembered, at the
+first, that my pulse had been distinctly accelerated with the excitement
+of what had taken place.  And somehow, as I leaned back in my chair and
+lighted a cigarette, the strangeness of the whole voyage vividly came to
+me.  Miss West and I talk philosophy and art on the poop of a stately
+ship in a circle of flashing sea, while Captain West dreams of his far
+home, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire stand watch and watch and snarl
+orders, and the slaves of men pull and haul, and Possum has fits, and
+Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs burn with hatred unconsumable, and the small-
+handed half-caste Chinese cooks for all, and Sundry Buyers perpetually
+presses his abdomen, and O'Sullivan raves in the steel cell of the
+'midship-house, and Charles Davis lies about him nursing a marlin-spike,
+and Christian Jespersen, miles astern, is deep sunk in the sea with a
+sack of coal at his feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Two weeks out to-day, on a balmy sea, under a cloud-flecked sky, and
+slipping an easy eight knots through the water to a light easterly wind.
+Captain West said he was almost convinced that it was the north-east
+trade.  Also, I have learned that the _Elsinore_, in order to avoid being
+jammed down on Cape San Roque, on the Brazil coast, must first fight
+eastward almost to the coast of Africa.  On occasion, on this traverse,
+the Cape Verde Islands are raised.  No wonder the voyage from Baltimore
+to Seattle is reckoned at eighteen thousand miles.
+
+I found Tony, the suicidal Greek, steering this morning when I came on
+deck.  He seemed sensible enough, and quite rationally took off his hat
+when I said good morning to him.  The sick men are improving nicely, with
+the exceptions of Charles Davis and O'Sullivan.  The latter still is
+lashed to his bunk, and Mr. Pike has compelled Davis to attend on him.  As
+a result, Davis moves about the deck, bringing food and water from the
+galley and grumbling his wrongs to every member of the crew.
+
+Wada told me a strange thing this morning.  It seems that he, the
+steward, and the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the cook's
+room--all being Asiatics--where they talk over ship's gossip.  They seem
+to miss little, and Wada brings it all to me.  The thing Wada told me was
+the curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire.  They have sat in judgment on him
+and they do not approve of his intimacy with the three gangsters for'ard.
+
+"But, Wada," I said, "he is not that kind of a man.  He is very hard and
+rough with all the sailors.  He treats them like dogs.  You know that."
+
+"Sure," assented Wada.  "Other sailors he do that.  But those three very
+bad men he make good friends.  Louis say second mate belong aft like
+first mate and captain.  No good for second mate talk like friend with
+sailors.  No good for ship.  Bime by trouble.  You see.  Louis say Mr.
+Mellaire crazy do that kind funny business."
+
+All of which, if it were true, and I saw no reason to doubt it, led me to
+inquire.  It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert
+Rhine, have made themselves cocks of the forecastle.  Standing together,
+they have established a reign of terror and are ruling the forecastle.
+All their training in New York in ruling the slum brutes and weaklings in
+their gangs fits them for the part.  As near as I could make out from
+Wada's tale, they first began on the two Italians in their watch, Guido
+Bombini and Mike Cipriani.  By means I cannot guess, they have reduced
+these two wretches to trembling slaves.  As an instance, the other night,
+according to the ship's gossip, Bert Rhine made Bombini get out of bed
+and fetch him a drink of water.
+
+Isaac Chantz is likewise under their rule, though he is treated more
+kindly.  Herman Lunkenheimer, a good-natured but simple-minded dolt of a
+German, received a severe beating from the three because he refused to
+wash some of Nosey Murphy's dirty garments.  The two bosuns are in fear
+of their lives with this clique, which is growing; for Steve Roberts, the
+ex-cowboy, and the white-slaver, Arthur Deacon, have been admitted to it.
+
+I am the only one aft who possesses this information, and I confess I
+don't know what to do with it.  I know that Mr. Pike would tell me to
+mind my own business.  Mr. Mellaire is out of the question.  And Captain
+West hasn't any crew.  And I fear Miss West would laugh at me for my
+pains.  Besides, I understand that every forecastle has its bully, or
+group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern of
+the afterguard.  The ship's work goes on.  The only effect I can
+conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow to
+this petty tyranny for'ard.
+
+--Oh, and another thing Wada told me.  The gangster clique has
+established its privilege of taking first cut of the salt-beef in the
+meat-kids.  After that, the rest take the rejected pieces.  But I will
+say, contrary to my expectations, the _Elsinore's_ forecastle is well
+found.  The men are not on whack.  They have all they want to eat.  A
+barrel of good hardtack stands always open in the forecastle.  Louis
+bakes fresh bread for the sailors three times a week.  The variety of
+food is excellent, if not the quality.  There is no restriction in the
+amount of water for drinking purposes.  And I can only say that in this
+good weather the men's appearance improves daily.
+
+Possum is very sick.  Each day he grows thinner.  Scarcely can I call him
+a perambulating skeleton, because he is too weak to walk.  Each day, in
+this delightful weather, Wada, under Miss West's instructions, brings him
+up in his box and places him out of the wind on the awninged poop.  She
+has taken full charge of the puppy, and has him sleep in her room each
+night.  I found her yesterday, in the chart-room, reading up the
+_Elsinore's_ medical library.  Later on she overhauled the
+medicine-chest.  She is essentially the life-giving, life-conserving
+female of the species.  All her ways, for herself and for others, make
+toward life.
+
+And yet--and this is so curious it gives me pause--she shows no interest
+in the sick and injured for'ard.
+
+They are to her cattle, or less than cattle.  As the life-giver and race-
+conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping
+regularly into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the midship-
+house and dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts.  On the contrary,
+as with her father, these wretched humans do not exist.
+
+And still again, when the steward jammed a splinter under his nail, she
+was greatly concerned, and manipulated the tweezers and pulled it out.
+The Elsinore reminds me of a slave plantation before the war; and Miss
+West is the lady of the plantation, interested only in the house-slaves.
+The field slaves are beyond her ken or consideration, and the sailors are
+the Elsinore's field slaves.  Why, several days back, when Wada suffered
+from a severe headache, she was quite perturbed, and dosed him with
+aspirin.  Well, I suppose this is all due to her sea-training.  She has
+been trained hard.
+
+We have the phonograph in the second dog-watch every other evening in
+this fine weather.  On the alternate evenings this period is Mr. Pike's
+watch on deck.  But when it is his evening below, even at dinner, he
+betrays his anticipation by an eagerness ill suppressed.  And yet, on
+each such occasion, he punctiliously waits until we ask if we are to be
+favoured with music.  Then his hard-bitten face lights up, although the
+lines remain hard as ever, hiding his ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly,
+off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over a few records.  And so,
+every other evening, we watch this killer and driver, with lacerated
+knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved discs,
+ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the voyage,
+at such moments believing in God.
+
+A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore.  I confess, while it
+seems that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with every
+detail of the little round of living, that I cannot orient myself.  My
+mind continually strays from things non-understandable to things
+incomprehensible--from our Samurai captain with the exquisite Gabriel
+voice that is heard only in the tumult and thunder of storm; on to the
+ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with the bright, liquid, pain-filled
+eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the forecastle and seduce the
+second mate; to the perpetually muttering O'Sullivan in the steel-walled
+hole and the complaining Davis nursing the marlin-spike in the upper
+bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift in this vastitude of
+ocean with a coal-sack at his feet.  At such moments all the life on the
+_Elsinore_ becomes as unreal as life to the philosopher is unreal.
+
+I am a philosopher.  Therefore, it is unreal to me.  But is it unreal to
+Messrs.  Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the rest of
+the stupid herd for'ard?  I cannot help remembering a remark of De
+Casseres.  It was over the wine in Mouquin's.  Said he: "The profoundest
+instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real.
+He shuns facts from his infancy.  His life is a perpetual evasion.
+Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive.  He lives on fiction and
+myth.  It is the Lie that makes him free.  Animals alone are given the
+privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not.  The animal, awake,
+has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination.  Man,
+awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable,
+Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love.  From Medusa-Truth he
+makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
+
+Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly.  And so, the thought comes
+to me, that to all these slaves of the _Elsinore_ the Real is real
+because they fictionally escape it.  One and all they are obsessed with
+the belief that they are free agents.  To me the Real is unreal, because
+I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth.  My pristine fictional
+escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely to
+the wheel of the Real.  I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist on
+board the _Elsinore_.  Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the
+whole phenomena of living on the _Elsinore_ see it only as
+phantasmagoria.
+
+Paradoxes?  I admit it.  All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
+contradictions.  But all the others on the _Elsinore_, sheer surface
+swimmers, keep afloat on this sea--forsooth, because they have never
+dreamed its depth.  And I can easily imagine what Miss West's practical,
+hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine.  After all,
+words are traps.  I don't know what I know, nor what I think I think.
+
+This I do know: I cannot orient myself.  I am the maddest and most sea-
+lost soul on board.  Take Miss West.  I am beginning to admire her.  Why,
+I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably healthy.  And yet,
+it is this very health of her, the absence of any shred of degenerative
+genius, that prevents her from being great . . . for instance, in her
+music.
+
+A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her
+playing.  The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the
+best.  To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr,
+and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago.  And yet she
+lacks in her music.
+
+Her touch is masterful.  She has the firmness and weight (without
+sharpness or pounding) of a man's playing--the strength and surety that
+most women lack and that some women know they lack.  When she makes a
+slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is
+overcome.  And she is quick to overcome it.
+
+Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no
+sentiment, no fire.  When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness
+and neatness.  She is the master of Chopin's technique, but she never
+walks where Chopin walks on the heights.  Somehow, she stops short of the
+fulness of music.
+
+I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my
+suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies.  On the Third
+Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was.
+
+"You were talking of Debussy," she remarked.  "I've got some of his stuff
+here.  But I don't get into it.  I don't understand it, and there is no
+use in trying.  It doesn't seem altogether like real music to me.  It
+fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold of it."
+
+"Yet you like MacDowell," I challenged.
+
+"Y. . . es," she admitted grudgingly.  "His New England Idylls and
+Fireside Tales.  And I like that Finnish man's stuff, Sibelius, too,
+although it seems to me too soft, too richly soft, too beautiful, if you
+know what I mean.  It seems to cloy."
+
+What a pity, I thought, that with that noble masculine touch of hers she
+is unaware of the deeps of music.  Some day I shall try to get from her
+just what Beethoven, say, and Chopin, mean to her.  She has not read
+Shaw's _Perfect Wagnerite_, nor had she ever heard of Nietzsche's _Case
+of Wagner_.  She likes Mozart, and old Boccherini, and Leonardo Leo.
+Likewise she is partial to Schumann, especially Forest Scenes.  And she
+played his Papillons most brilliantly.  When I closed my eyes I could
+have sworn it was a man's fingers on the keys.
+
+And yet, I must say it, in the long run her playing makes me nervous.  I
+am continually led up to false expectations.  Always, she seems just on
+the verge of achieving the big thing, the super-big thing, and always she
+just misses it by a shade.  Just as I am prepared for the culminating
+flash and illumination, I receive more perfection of technique.  She is
+cold.  She must be cold . . . Or else, and the theory is worth
+considering, she is too healthy.
+
+I shall certainly read to her _The Daughters of Herodias_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Was there ever such a voyage!  This morning, when I came on deck, I found
+nobody at the wheel.  It was a startling sight--the great _Elsinore_, by
+the wind, under an Alpine range of canvas, every sail set from skysails
+to try-sails and spanker, slipping across the surface of a mild trade-
+wind sea, and no hand at the wheel to guide her.
+
+No one was on the poop.  It was Mr. Pike's watch, and I strolled for'ard
+along the bridge to find him.  He was on Number One hatch giving some
+instructions to the sail-makers.  I awaited my chance, until he glanced
+up and greeted me.
+
+"Good morning," I answered.  "And what man is at the wheel now?"
+
+"That crazy Greek, Tony," he replied.
+
+"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco he isn't," I offered.
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me with quick sharpness.
+
+"Who is at the wheel?"
+
+"Nobody," I replied.
+
+And then he exploded into action.  The age-lag left his massive frame,
+and he bounded aft along the deck at a speed no man on board could have
+exceeded; and I doubt if very many could have equalled it.  He went up
+the poop-ladder three steps at a time and disappeared in the direction of
+the wheel behind the chart-house.
+
+Next came a promptitude of bellowed orders, and all the watch was
+slacking away after braces to starboard and pulling on after braces to
+port.  I had already learned the manoeuvre.  Mr. Pike was wearing ship.
+
+As I returned aft along the bridge Mr. Mellaire and the carpenter emerged
+from the cabin door.  They had been interrupted at breakfast, for they
+were wiping their mouths.  Mr. Pike came to the break of the poop, called
+down instructions to the second mate, who proceeded for'ard, and ordered
+the carpenter to take the wheel.
+
+As the _Elsinore_ swung around on her heel Mr. Pike put her on the back
+track so as to cover the water she had just crossed over.  He lowered the
+glasses through which he was scanning the sea and pointed down the
+hatchway that opened into the big after-room beneath.  The ladder was
+gone.
+
+"Must have taken the lazarette ladder with him," said Mr. Pike.
+
+Captain West strolled out of the chart-room.  He said good morning in his
+customary way, courteously to me and formally to the mate, and strolled
+on along the poop to the wheel, where he paused to glance into the
+binnacle.  Turning, he went on leisurely to the break of the poop.  Again
+he came back to us.  Fully two minutes must have elapsed ere he spoke.
+
+"What is the matter, Mr. Pike?  Man overboard?"
+
+"Yes, sir," was the answer.
+
+"And took the lazarette ladder along with him?" Captain West queried.
+
+"Yes, sir.  It's the Greek that jumped over at Baltimore."
+
+Evidently the affair was not serious enough for Captain West to be the
+Samurai.  He lighted a cigar and resumed his stroll.  And yet he had
+missed nothing, not even the absence of the ladder.
+
+Mr. Pike sent look-outs aloft to every skysail-yard, and the _Elsinore_
+slipped along through the smooth sea.  Miss West came up and stood beside
+me, searching the ocean with her eyes while I told her the little I knew.
+She evidenced no excitement, and reassured me by telling me how difficult
+it was to lose a man of Tony's suicidal type.
+
+"Their madness always seems to come upon them in fine weather or under
+safe circumstances," she smiled, "when a boat can be lowered or a tug is
+alongside.  And sometimes they take life--preservers with them, as in
+this case."
+
+At the end of an hour Mr. Pike wore the _Elsinore_ around, and again
+retraced the course she must have been sailing when the Greek went over.
+Captain West still strolled and smoked, and Miss West made a brief trip
+below to give Wada forgotten instructions about Possum.  Andy Pay was
+called to the wheel, and the carpenter went below to finish his
+breakfast.
+
+It all seemed rather callous to me.  Nobody was much concerned for the
+man who was overboard somewhere on that lonely ocean.  And yet I had to
+admit that everything possible was being done to find him.  I talked a
+little with Mr. Pike, and he seemed more vexed than anything else.  He
+disliked to have the ship's work interrupted in such fashion.
+
+Mr. Mellaire's attitude was different.
+
+"We are short-handed enough as it is," he told me, when he joined us on
+the poop.  "We can't afford to lose him even if he is crazy.  We need
+him.  He's a good sailor most of the time."
+
+The hail came from the mizzen-skysail-yard.  The Maltese Cockney it was
+who first sighted the man and called down the information.  The mate,
+looking to windwards, suddenly lowered his glasses, rubbed his eyes in a
+puzzled way, and looked again.  Then Miss West, using another pair of
+glasses, cried out in surprise and began to laugh.
+
+"What do you make of it, Miss West?" the mate asked.
+
+"He doesn't seem to be in the water.  He's standing up."
+
+Mr. Pike nodded.
+
+"He's on the ladder," he said.  "I'd forgotten that.  It fooled me at
+first.  I couldn't understand it."  He turned to the second mate.  "Mr.
+Mellaire, will you launch the long boat and get some kind of a crew into
+it while I back the main-yard?  I'll go in the boat.  Pick men that can
+pull an oar."
+
+"You go, too," Miss West said to me.  "It will be an opportunity to get
+outside the _Elsinore_ and see her under full sail."
+
+Mr. Pike nodded consent, so I went along, sitting near him in the stern-
+sheets where he steered, while half a dozen hands rowed us toward the
+suicide, who stood so weirdly upon the surface of the sea.  The Maltese
+Cockney pulled the stroke oar, and among the other five men was one whose
+name I had but recently learned--Ditman Olansen, a Norwegian.  A good
+seaman, Mr. Mellaire had told me, in whose watch he was; a good seaman,
+but "crank-eyed."  When pressed for an explanation Mr. Mellaire had said
+that he was the sort of man who flew into blind rages, and that one never
+could tell what little thing would produce such a rage.  As near as I
+could grasp it, Ditman Olansen was a Berserker type.  Yet, as I watched
+him pulling in good time at the oar, his large, pale-blue eyes seemed
+almost bovine--the last man in the world, in my judgment, to have a
+Berserker fit.
+
+As we drew close to the Greek he began to scream menacingly at us and to
+brandish a sheath-knife.  His weight sank the ladder until the water
+washed his knees, and on this submerged support he balanced himself with
+wild writhing and outflinging of arms.  His face, grimacing like a
+monkey's, was not a pretty thing to look upon.  And as he continued to
+threaten us with the knife I wondered how the problem of rescuing him
+would be solved.
+
+But I should have trusted Mr. Pike for that.  He removed the
+boat-stretcher from under the Maltese Cockney's feet and laid it close to
+hand in the stern-sheets.  Then he had the men reverse the boat and back
+it upon the Greek.  Dodging a sweep of the knife, Mr. Pike awaited his
+chance, until a passing wave lifted the boat's stern high, while Tony was
+sinking toward the trough.  This was the moment.  Again I was favoured
+with a sample of the lightning speed with which that aged man of sixty-
+nine could handle his body.  Timed precisely, and delivered in a flash
+and with weight, the boat-stretcher came down on the Greek's head.  The
+knife fell into the sea, and the demented creature collapsed and followed
+it, knocked unconscious.  Mr. Pike scooped him out, quite effortlessly it
+seemed to me, and flung him into the boat's bottom at my feet.
+
+The next moment the men were bending to their oars and the mate was
+steering back to the _Elsinore_.  It was a stout rap Mr. Pike had
+administered with the boat-stretcher.  Thin streaks of blood oozed on the
+damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp.  I could but stare at the
+lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet.  A man, all
+life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced the next
+moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of death, is always
+a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of the philosopher.  And
+in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by means of a stick of
+wood brought sharply in contact with his skull.
+
+If Tony the Greek be accounted an _appearance_, what was he now?--a
+_disappearance_?  And if so, whither had he disappeared?  And whence
+would he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call
+consciousness returned to him?  The first word, much less the last, of
+the phenomena of personality and consciousness yet remains to be uttered
+by the psychologists.
+
+Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle of
+the _Elsinore_ burst upon me.  I had been so long on board, and in board
+of her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship.  So low to the
+water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the tall, sky-reaching
+spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of canvas seemed
+preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of the law of
+gravitation.  It required effort to realize that that slim curve of hull
+inclosed and bore up from the sea's bottom five thousand tons of coal.
+And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites of men had conceived and
+constructed so stately and magnificent an element-defying fabric--mites
+of men, most woefully like the Greek at my feet, prone to precipitation
+into the blackness by means of a rap on the head with a piece of wood.
+
+Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned.
+From somewhere he was reappearing.  I noticed Mr. Pike look at him
+quickly, as if apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would
+require more boat-stretcher.  But Tony merely fluttered his big black
+eyes open and stared at me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere he
+closed them again.
+
+"What are you going to do with him?" I asked the mate.
+
+"Put 'm back to work," was the reply.  "It's all he's good for, and he
+ain't hurt.  Somebody's got to work this ship around the Horn."
+
+When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below.  In
+the chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers.  Mr. Mellaire
+had turned in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch on deck at
+noon.  Mr. Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to state, does not
+sleep aft.  He shares a room in the 'midship-house with Mr. Pike's Nancy.
+
+Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek.  He was bundled out
+upon Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended, to
+recover consciousness as he might elect.  Yes, and so inured have I
+become that I make free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself.  My
+eyes were still filled with the beauty of the _Elsinore_.  One does grow
+hard at sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+One does not mind the trades.  We have held the north-east trade for days
+now, and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls and
+tinkles on the taffrail.  Yesterday, log and observation approximated a
+run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before we ran two hundred
+and forty, and the day before that two hundred and sixty-one.  But one
+does not appreciate the force of the wind.  So balmy and exhilarating is
+it that it is so much atmospheric wine.  I delight to open my lungs and
+my pores to it.  Nor does it chill.  At any hour of the night, while the
+cabin lies asleep, I break off from my reading and go up on the poop in
+the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.
+
+I never knew before what the trade wind was.  And now I am infatuated
+with it.  I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever mate
+has the watch.  Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr. Pike, on
+these delicious nights, stands his first watch after midnight in his
+pyjamas.  He is a fearfully muscular man.  Sixty-nine years seem
+impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed like fleshings
+against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge muscle.  A splendid
+figure of a man!  What he must have been in the hey-day of youth two
+score years and more ago passes comprehension.
+
+The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream.  Here, where
+time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the watches,
+where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to one's notice by
+the striking of the ship's bells fore and aft, time ceases.  Days merge
+into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for one, can never remember
+the day of the week or month.
+
+The _Elsinore_ is never totally asleep.  Day and night, always, there are
+the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at the
+wheel, and the officer of the deck.  I lie reading in my bunk, which is
+on the weather side, and continually over my head during the long night
+hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other, pacing up and down,
+and, as I well know, the man himself is for ever peering for'ard from the
+break of the poop, or glancing into the binnacle, or feeling and gauging
+the weight and direction of wind on his cheek, or watching the
+cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud across the stars and the moon.
+Always, always, there are wakeful eyes on the _Elsinore_.
+
+Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o'clock, as I lay with the
+printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an abrupt
+outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike.  I located him as at the break of the
+poop; and the man at whom he snarled was Larry, evidently on the main
+deck beneath him.  Not until Wada brought me breakfast did I learn what
+had occurred.
+
+Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face, and
+his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some unlucky
+whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of darkness on the
+main deck.  But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of the poop, had
+picked the offender unerringly.  This was when the explosion occurred.
+Then the unfortunate Larry, truly half-devil and all child, had waxed
+sullen and retorted still more insolently; and the next he knew, the
+mate, descending upon him like a hurricane, had handcuffed him to the
+mizzen fife-rail.
+
+Imagine, on Mr. Pike's part, that this was one for Larry and at least ten
+for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  I'll not be so absurd as to
+say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters.  I doubt if he has ever
+experienced fear.  It is not in him.  On the other hand, I am confident
+that he apprehends trouble from these men, and that it was for their
+benefit he made this example of Larry.
+
+Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his stupid
+brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because he
+bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair fight.
+Promptly Mr. Pike was there with the key to the handcuffs.  As if Larry
+had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged man!  Wada
+reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a couple of front
+teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day.  When I met Mr. Pike on
+deck after eight o'clock I glanced at his knuckles.  They verified Wada's
+tale.
+
+I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little events
+like the foregoing.  Not only has time ceased, but the world has ceased.
+Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these weeks I have
+received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no visitor.  I have
+not been to the play.  I have not read a newspaper.  So far as I am
+concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers.  All such things have
+vanished with the vanished world.  All that exists is the _Elsinore_,
+with her queer human freightage and her cargo of coal, cleaving a rotund
+of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen miles away.
+
+I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture, who
+for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be alive.  Not
+until the world learned of his death was he anything but alive to the
+world.  By the same token, was he not alive?  And by the same token, here
+on the _Elsinore_, has not the land-world ceased?  May not the pupil of
+one's eye be, not merely the centre of the world, but the world itself?
+Truly, it is tenable that the world exists only in consciousness.  "The
+world is my idea," said Schopenhauer.  Said Jules de Gaultier, "The world
+is my invention."  His dogma was that imagination created the Real.  Ah,
+me, I know that the practical Miss West would dub my metaphysics a
+depressing and unhealthful exercise of my wits.
+
+To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read _The Daughters of
+Herodias_ to Miss West.  It was superb in its effect--just what I had
+expected of her.  She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for her
+father while I read.  (She is never idle, being so essentially a nest-
+maker and comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a whole pile
+of these handkerchiefs for her father.)
+
+She smiled, how shall I say?--oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh, with
+all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm, long
+gray eyes, when I read:
+
+   "But they smile innocently and dance on,
+   Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:
+   'Am I not beautiful?  Shall I not be loved?'
+   Be patient, for they will not understand,
+   Not till the end of time will they put by
+   The weaving of slow steps about men's hearts."
+
+"But it is well for the world that it is so," was her comment.
+
+Ah, Symons knew women!  His perfect knowledge she attested when I read
+that magnificent passage:
+
+   "They do not understand that in the world
+   There grows between the sunlight and the grass
+   Anything save themselves desirable.
+   It seems to them that the swift eyes of men
+   Are made but to be mirrors, not to see
+   Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.
+   'For are not we,' they say, 'the end of all?
+   Why should you look beyond us?  If you look
+   Into the night, you will find nothing there:
+   We also have gazed often at the stars.'"
+
+"It is true," said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to see
+how she had received the thought.  "We also have gazed often at the
+stars."
+
+It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.
+
+"But wait," I cried.  "Let me read on."  And I read:
+
+   "'We, we alone among all beautiful things,
+   We only are real: for the rest are dreams.
+   Why will you follow after wandering dreams
+   When we await you?  And you can but dream
+   Of us, and in our image fashion them.'"
+
+"True, most true," she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and power
+mounted in her eyes.
+
+"A wonderful poem," she conceded--nay, proclaimed--when I had done.
+
+"But do you not see . . ."  I began impulsively, then abandoned the
+attempt.  For how could she see, being woman, the "far-off, disastrous,
+unattainable things," when she, as she so stoutly averred, had gazed
+often on the stars?
+
+She?  What could she see, save what all women see--that they only are
+real, and that all the rest are dreams.
+
+"I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias," said Miss West.
+
+"Well," I admitted lamely, "we agree.  You remember it is what I told you
+you were."
+
+"I am grateful for the compliment," she said; and in those long gray eyes
+of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and self-certitude
+and answering complacency of power that constitute so large a part of the
+seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Heavens!--how I read in this fine weather.  I take so little exercise
+that my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions,
+such as life teems with on the land, that I read myself almost stupid.
+Recommend me a sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind in his
+reading.  I am making up years of it.  It is an orgy, a debauch; and I am
+sure the addled sailors adjudge me the queerest creature on board.
+
+At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for any
+diversion.  When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the north-east
+and the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my little twenty-
+two automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot.  I used to shoot, when
+I was a wee lad.  I can remember dragging a shot-gun around with me over
+the hills.  Also, I possessed an air-rifle, with which, on great
+occasion, I was even able to slaughter a robin.
+
+While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space for
+deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from either
+side of the chart-house and that are of the width of the chart-house.
+This space again is restricted to one side or the other according to the
+slant of the morning and afternoon sun and the freshness of the breeze.
+Wherefore, Miss West's chair and mine are most frequently side by side.
+Captain West has a chair, which he infrequently occupies.  He has so
+little to do in the working of the ship, taking his regular observations
+and working them up with such celerity, that he is rarely in the chart-
+room for any length of time.  He elects to spend his hours in the main
+cabin, not reading, not doing anything save dream with eyes wide open in
+the draught of wind that pours through the open ports and door from out
+the huge crojack and the jigger staysails.
+
+Miss West is never idle.  Below, in the big after-room, she does her own
+laundering.  Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine linen.
+In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine.  All
+hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-
+chair beside me.  She avers that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of
+sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things and land-things
+along with her--even to her pretty china for afternoon tea.
+
+Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker.  She is a born cook.
+The steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and _de luxe_ for the
+cabin table; yet Miss West is able at a moment's notice to improve on
+these dishes.  She never lets any of their dishes come on the table
+without first planning them or passing on them.  She has quick judgment,
+an unerring taste, and is possessed of the needful steel of decision.  It
+seems she has only to look at a dish, no matter who has cooked it, and
+immediately divine its lack or its surplusage, and prescribe a treatment
+that transforms it into something indescribably different and
+delicious--My, how I do eat!  I am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing
+voracity of my appetite.  Already am I quite convinced that I am glad
+Miss West is making the voyage.
+
+She has sailed "out East," as she quaintly calls it, and has an enormous
+repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes.  In the cooking of rice Louis
+is a master; but in the making of the accompanying curry he fades into a
+blundering amateur compared with Miss West.  In the matter of curry she
+is a sheer genius.  How often one's thoughts dwell upon food when at sea!
+
+So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West.  I read
+all the time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to her
+passages, and even books, with which I am interested in trying her out.
+Then, too, such reading gives rise to discussions, and she has not yet
+uttered anything that would lead me to change my first judgment of her.
+She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.
+
+And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl.  She isn't a girl,
+she is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl.  She has the
+carriage, the attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and yet she cannot
+be described as being in the slightest degree stately.  She is generous,
+dependable, sensible--yes, and sensitive; and her superabundant vitality,
+the vitality that makes her walk so gloriously, discounts the maturity of
+her.  Sometimes she seems all of thirty to me; at other times, when her
+spirits and risibilities are aroused, she scarcely seems thirteen.  I
+shall make a point of asking Captain West the date of the _Dixie's_
+collision with that river steamer in San Francisco Bay.  In a word, she
+is the most normal, the most healthy, natural woman I have ever known.
+
+Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair, that
+it is as invariably smooth and well-groomed as all the rest of her.  On
+the other hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved by the
+latitude of dress she allows herself.  She never fails of being a woman.
+Her sex, and the lure of it, is ever present.  Possibly she may possess
+high collars, but I have never seen her in one on board.  Her blouses are
+always open at the throat, disclosing one of her choicest assets, the
+muscular, adequate neck, with its fine-textured garmenture of skin.  I
+embarrass myself by stealing long glances at that bare throat of hers and
+at the hint of fine, firm-surfaced shoulder.
+
+Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function.  At least
+once each day we make the journey for'ard along the bridge to the top of
+the 'midship-house.  Possum, who is now convalescent, accompanies us.  The
+steward makes a point of being there so as to receive instructions and
+report the egg-output and laying conduct of the many hens.  At the
+present time our four dozen hens are laying two dozen eggs a day, with
+which record Miss West is greatly elated.
+
+Already she has given names to most of them.  The cock is Peter, of
+course.  A much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden.  A slim, trim thing that
+dogs Peter's heels she calls Cleopatra.  Another hen--the
+mellowest-voiced one of all--she addresses as Bernhardt.  One thing I
+have noted: whenever she and the steward have passed death sentence on a
+non-laying hen (which occurs regularly once a week), she takes no part in
+the eating of the meat, not even when it is metamorphosed into one of her
+delectable curries.  At such times she has a special curry made for
+herself of tinned lobster, or shrimp, or tinned chicken.
+
+Ah, I must not forget.  I have learned that it was no man-interest (in
+me, if you please) that brought about her sudden interest to come on the
+voyage.  It was for her father that she came.  Something is the matter
+with Captain West.  At rare moments I have observed her gazing at him
+with a world of solicitude and anxiety in her eyes.
+
+I was telling an amusing story at table yesterday midday, when my glance
+chanced to rest upon Miss West.  She was not listening.  Her food on her
+fork was suspended in the air a sheer instant as she looked at her father
+with all her eyes.  It was a stare of fear.  She realized that I was
+observing, and with superb control, slowly, quite naturally, she lowered
+the fork and rested it on her plate, retaining her hold on it and
+retaining her father's face in her look.
+
+But I had seen.  Yes; I had seen more than that.  I had seen Captain
+West's face a transparent white, while his eyelids fluttered down and his
+lips moved noiselessly.  Then the eyelids raised, the lips set again with
+their habitual discipline, and the colour slowly returned to his face.  It
+was as if he had been away for a time and just returned.  But I had seen,
+and guessed her secret.
+
+And yet it was this same Captain West, seven hours later, who chastened
+the proud sailor spirit of Mr. Pike.  It was in the second dog-watch that
+evening, a dark night, and the watch was pulling away on the main deck.  I
+had just come out of the chart-house door and seen Captain West pace by
+me, hands in pockets, toward the break of the poop.  Abruptly, from the
+mizzen-mast, came a snap of breakage and crash of fabric.  At the same
+instant the men fell backward and sprawled over the deck.
+
+A moment of silence followed, and then Captain West's voice went out:
+
+"What carried away, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"The halyards, sir," came the reply out of the darkness.
+
+There was a pause.  Again Captain West's voice went out.
+
+"Next time slack away on your sheet first."
+
+Now Mr. Pike is incontestably a splendid seaman.  Yet in this instance he
+had been wrong.  I have come to know him, and I can well imagine the hurt
+to his pride.  And more--he has a wicked, resentful, primitive nature,
+and though he answered respectfully enough, "Yes, sir," I felt safe in
+predicting to myself that the poor devils under him would receive the
+weight of his resentment in the later watches of the night.
+
+They evidently did; for this morning I noted a black eye on John Hackey,
+a San Francisco hoodlum, and Guido Bombini was carrying a freshly and
+outrageously swollen jaw.  I asked Wada about the matter, and he soon
+brought me the news.  Quite a bit of beating up takes place for'ard of
+the deck-houses in the night watches while we of the after-guard
+peacefully slumber.
+
+Even to-day Mr. Pike is going around sullen and morose, snarling at the
+men more than usual, and barely polite to Miss West and me when we chance
+to address him.  His replies are grunted in monosyllables, and his face
+is set in superlative sourness.  Miss West who is unaware of the
+occurrence, laughs and calls it a "sea grouch"--a phenomenon with which
+she claims large experience.
+
+But I know Mr. Pike now--the stubborn, wonderful old sea-dog.  It will be
+three days before he is himself again.  He takes a terrible pride in his
+seamanship, and what hurts him most is the knowledge that he was guilty
+of the blunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+To-day, twenty-eight days out, in the early morning, while I was drinking
+my coffee, still carrying the north-east trade, we crossed the line.  And
+Charles Davis signalized the event by murdering O'Sullivan.  It was
+Boney, the lanky splinter of a youth in Mr. Mellaire's watch, who brought
+the news.  The second mate and I had just arrived in the hospital room,
+when Mr. Pike entered.
+
+O'Sullivan's troubles were over.  The man in the upper bunk had completed
+the mad, sad span of his life with the marlin-spike.
+
+I cannot understand this Charles Davis.  He sat up calmly in his bunk,
+and calmly lighted his pipe ere he replied to Mr. Mellaire.  He certainly
+is not insane.  Yet deliberately, in cold blood, he has murdered a
+helpless man.
+
+"What'd you do it for?" Mr. Mellaire demanded.
+
+"Because, sir," said Charles Davis, applying a second match to his pipe,
+"because"--puff, puff--"he bothered my sleep."  Here he caught Mr. Pike's
+glowering eye.  "Because"--puff, puff--"he annoyed me.  The next
+time"--puff, puff--"I hope better judgment will be shown in what kind of
+a man is put in with me.  Besides"--puff, puff--"this top bunk ain't no
+place for me.  It hurts me to get into it"--puff, puff--"an' I'm gem'
+back to that lower bunk as soon as you get O'Sullivan out of it."
+
+"But what'd you do it for?" Mr. Pike snarled.
+
+"I told you, sir, because he annoyed me.  I got tired of it, an' so, this
+morning, I just put him out of his misery.  An' what are you goin' to do
+about it?  The man's dead, ain't he?  An' I killed 'm in self-defence.  I
+know the law.  What right'd you to put a ravin' lunatic in with me, an'
+me sick an' helpless?"
+
+"By God, Davis!" the mate burst forth.  "You'll never draw your pay-day
+in Seattle.  I'll fix you out for this, killing a crazy lashed down in
+his bunk an' harmless.  You'll follow 'm overside, my hearty."
+
+"If I do, you'll hang for it, sir," Davis retorted.  He turned his cool
+eyes on me.  "An' I call on you, sir, to witness the threats he's made.
+An' you'll testify to them, too, in court.  An' he'll hang as sure as I
+go over the side.  Oh, I know his record.  He's afraid to face a court
+with it.  He's been up too many a time with charges of man-killin' an'
+brutality on the high seas.  An' a man could retire for life an live off
+the interest of the fines he's paid, or his owners paid for him--"
+
+"Shut your mouth or I'll knock it out of your face!" Mr. Pike roared,
+springing toward him with clenched, up-raised fist.
+
+Davis involuntarily shrank away.  His flesh was weak, but not so his
+spirit.  He got himself promptly in hand and struck another match.
+
+"You can't get my goat, sir," he sneered, under the shadow of the
+impending blow.  "I ain't scared to die.  A man's got to die once anyway,
+an' it's none so hard a trick to do when you can't help it.  O'Sullivan
+died so easy it was amazin'.  Besides, I ain't goin' to die.  I'm goin'
+to finish this voyage, an' sue the owners when I get to Seattle.  I know
+my rights an' the law.  An' I got witnesses."
+
+Truly, I was divided between admiration for the courage of this wretched
+sailor and sympathy for Mr. Pike thus bearded by a sick man he could not
+bring himself to strike.
+
+Nevertheless he sprang upon the man with calculated fury, gripped him
+between the base of the neck and the shoulders with both gnarled paws,
+and shook him back and forth, violently and frightfully, for a full
+minute.  It was a wonder the man's neck was not dislocated.
+
+"I call on you to witness, sir," Davis gasped at me the instant he was
+free.
+
+He coughed and strangled, felt his throat, and made wry neck-movements
+indicative of injury.
+
+"The marks'll begin to show in a few minutes," he murmured complacently
+as his dizziness left him and his breath came back.
+
+This was too much for Mr. Pike, who turned and left the room, growling
+and cursing incoherently, deep in his throat.  When I made my departure,
+a moment later, Davis was refilling his pipe and telling Mr. Mellaire
+that he'd have him up for a witness in Seattle.
+
+* * * * *
+
+So we have had another burial at sea.  Mr. Pike was vexed by it because
+the _Elsinore_, according to sea tradition, was going too fast through
+the water for a proper ceremony.  Thus a few minutes of the voyage were
+lost by backing the _Elsinore's_ main-topsail and deadening her way while
+the service was read and O'Sullivan was slid overboard with the
+inevitable sack of coal at his feet.
+
+"Hope the coal holds out," Mr. Pike grumbled morosely at me five minutes
+later.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended on by servants, sipping
+afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and art, while a
+few feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all the grimy, sordid
+tragedy of sordid, malformed, brutish life plays itself out.  And Captain
+West, remote, untroubled, sits dreaming in the twilight cabin while the
+draught of wind from the crojack blows upon him through the open ports.
+He has no doubts, no worries.  He believes in God.  All is settled and
+clear and well as he nears his far home.  His serenity is vast and
+enviable.  But I cannot shake from my eyes that vision of him when life
+forsook his veins, and his mouth slacked, and his eyelids closed, while
+his face took on the white transparency of death.
+
+I wonder who will be the next to finish the game and depart with a sack
+of coal.
+
+"Oh, this is nothing, sir," Mr. Mellaire remarked to me cheerfully as we
+strolled the poop during the first watch.  "I was once on a voyage on a
+tramp steamer loaded with four hundred Chinks--I beg your pardon,
+sir--Chinese.  They were coolies, contract labourers, coming back from
+serving their time.
+
+"And the cholera broke out.  We hove over three hundred of them
+overboard, sir, along with both bosuns, most of the Lascar crew, and the
+captain, the mate, the third mate, and the first and third engineers.  The
+second and one white oiler was all that was left below, and I was in
+command on deck, when we made port.  The doctors wouldn't come aboard.
+They made me anchor in the outer roads and told me to heave out my dead.
+There was some tall buryin' about that time, Mr. Pathurst, and they went
+overboard without canvas, coal, or iron.  They had to.  I had nobody to
+help me, and the Chinks below wouldn't lift a hand.
+
+"I had to go down myself, drag the bodies on to the slings, then climb on
+deck and heave them up with the donkey.  And each trip I took a drink.  I
+was pretty drunk when the job was done."
+
+"And you never caught it yourself?" I queried.  Mr. Mellaire held up his
+left hand.  I had often noted that the index finger was missing.
+
+"That's all that happened to me, sir.  The old man'd had a fox-terrier
+like yours.  And after the old man passed out the puppy got real, chummy
+with me.  Just as I was making the hoist of the last sling-load, what
+does the puppy do but jump on my leg and sniff my hand.  I turned to pat
+him, and the next I knew my other hand had slipped into the gears and
+that finger wasn't there any more.
+
+"Heavens!" I cried.  "What abominable luck to come through such a
+terrible experience like that and then lose your finger!"
+
+"That's what I thought, sir," Mr. Mellaire agreed.
+
+"What did you do?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, just held it up and looked at it, and said 'My goodness gracious!'
+and took another drink."
+
+"And you didn't get the cholera afterwards?"
+
+"No, sir.  I reckon I was so full of alcohol the germs dropped dead
+before they could get to me."  He considered a moment.  "Candidly, Mr.
+Pathurst, I don't know about that alcohol theory.  The old man and the
+mates died drunk, and so did the third engineer.  But the chief was a
+teetotaller, and he died, too."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Never again shall I wonder that the sea is hard.  I walked apart from the
+second mate and stared up at the magnificent fabric of the _Elsinore_
+sweeping and swaying great blotting curves of darkness across the face of
+the starry sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Something has happened.  But nobody knows, either fore or aft, except the
+interested persons, and they will not say anything.  Yet the ship is
+abuzz with rumours and guesses.
+
+This I do know: Mr. Pike has received a fearful blow on the head.  At
+table, yesterday, at midday, I arrived late, and, passing behind his
+chair, I saw a prodigious lump on top of his head.  When I was seated,
+facing him, I noted that his eyes seemed dazed; yes, and I could see pain
+in them.  He took no part in the conversation, ate perfunctorily, behaved
+stupidly at times, and it was patent that he was controlling himself with
+an iron hand.
+
+And nobody dares ask him what has happened.  I know I don't dare ask him,
+and I am a passenger, a privileged person.  This redoubtable old
+sea-relic has inspired me with a respect for him that partakes half of
+timidity and half of awe.
+
+He acts as if he were suffering from concussion of the brain.  His pain
+is evident, not alone in his eyes and the strained expression of his
+face, but by his conduct when he thinks he is unobserved.  Last night,
+just for a breath of air and a moment's gaze at the stars, I came out of
+the cabin door and stood on the main deck under the break of the poop.
+From directly over my head came a low and persistent groaning.  My
+curiosity was aroused, and I retreated into the cabin, came out softly on
+to the poop by way of the chart-house, and strolled noiselessly for'ard
+in my slippers.  It was Mr. Pike.  He was leaning collapsed on the rail,
+his head resting on his arms.  He was giving voice in secret to the pain
+that racked him.  A dozen feet away he could not be heard.  But, close to
+his shoulder, I could hear his steady, smothered groaning that seemed to
+take the form of a chant.  Also, at regular intervals, he would mutter:
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."  Always he repeated the
+phrase five times, then returned to his groaning.  I stole away as
+silently as I had come.
+
+Yet he resolutely stands his watches and performs all his duties of chief
+officer.  Oh, I forgot.  Miss West dared to quiz him, and he replied that
+he had a toothache, and that if it didn't get better he'd pull it out.
+
+Wada cannot learn what has happened.  There were no eye-witnesses.  He
+says that the Asiatic clique, discussing the affair in the cook's room,
+thinks the three gangsters are responsible.  Bert Rhine is carrying a
+lame shoulder.  Nosey Murphy is limping as from some injury in the hips.
+And Kid Twist has been so badly beaten that he has not left his bunk for
+two days.  And that is all the data to build on.  The gangsters are as
+close-mouthed as Mr. Pike.  The Asiatic clique has decided that murder
+was attempted and that all that saved the mate was his hard skull.
+
+Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I got another proof that Captain
+West is not so oblivious of what goes on aboard the _Elsinore_ as he
+seems.  I had gone for'ard along the bridge to the mizzen-mast, in the
+shadow of which I was leaning.  From the main deck, in the alley-way
+between the 'midship-house and the rail, came the voices of Bert Rhine,
+Nosey Murphy, and Mr. Mellaire.  It was not ship's work.  They were
+having a friendly, even sociable chat, for their voices hummed genially,
+and now and again one or another laughed, and sometimes all laughed.
+
+I remembered Wada's reports on this unseamanlike intimacy of the second
+mate with the gangsters, and tried to make out the nature of the
+conversation.  But the gangsters were low-voiced, and all I could catch
+was the tone of friendliness and good-nature.
+
+Suddenly, from the poop, came Captain West's voice.  It was the voice,
+not of the Samurai riding the storm, but of the Samurai calm and cold.  It
+was clear, soft, and mellow as the mellowest bell ever cast by eastern
+artificers of old time to call worshippers to prayer.  I know I slightly
+chilled to it--it was so exquisitely sweet and yet as passionless as the
+ring of steel on a frosty night.  And I knew the effect on the men
+beneath me was electrical.  I could _feel_ them stiffen and chill to it
+as I had stiffened and chilled.  And yet all he said was:
+
+"Mr. Mellaire."
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Mellaire, after a moment of tense silence.
+
+"Come aft here," came Captain West's voice.
+
+I heard the second mate move along the deck beneath me and stop at the
+foot of the poop-ladder.
+
+"Your place is aft on the poop, Mr. Mellaire," said the cold, passionless
+voice.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the second mate.
+
+That was all.  Not another word was spoken.  Captain West resumed his
+stroll on the weather side of the poop, and Mr. Mellaire, ascending the
+ladder, went to pacing up and down the lee side.
+
+I continued along the bridge to the forecastle head and purposely
+remained there half an hour ere I returned to the cabin by way of the
+main deck.  Although I did not analyze my motive, I knew I did not desire
+any one to know that I had overheard the occurrence.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I have made a discovery.  Ninety per cent. of our crew is brunette.  Aft,
+with the exception of Wada and the steward, who are our servants, we are
+all blonds.  What led me to this discovery was Woodruff's _Effects of
+Tropical Light on White Men_, which I am just reading.  Major Woodruff's
+thesis is that the white-skinned, blue-eyed Aryan, born to government and
+command, ever leaving his primeval, overcast and foggy home, ever
+commands and governs the rest of the world and ever perishes because of
+the too-white light he encounters.  It is a very tenable hypothesis, and
+will bear looking into.
+
+But to return.  Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a blond
+Aryan.  For'ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate blonds, the
+remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us are brunettes.
+They will not perish.  According to Woodruff, they will inherit the
+earth, not because of their capacity for mastery and government, but
+because of their skin-pigmentation which enables their tissues to resist
+the ravages of the sun.
+
+And I look at the four of us at table--Captain West, his daughter, Mr.
+Pike, and myself--all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet
+mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of our
+type on the earth.  Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may
+be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all
+peoples, disciplined them to obedience, taught them government, and dwelt
+in the palaces we have compelled them by the weight of our own right arms
+to build for us.
+
+The _Elsinore_ depicts this in miniature.  The best of the food and all
+spacious and beautiful accommodation is ours.  For'ard is a pig-sty and a
+slave-pen.
+
+As a king, Captain West sits above all.  As a captain of soldiers, Mr.
+Pike enforces his king's will.  Miss West is a princess of the royal
+house.  And I?  Am I not an honourable, noble-lineaged pensioner on the
+deeds and achievements of my father, who, in his day, compelled thousands
+of the lesser types to the building of the fortune I enjoy?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+The north-west trade carried us almost into the south-east trade, and
+then left us for several days to roll and swelter in the doldrums.
+
+During this time I have discovered that I have a genius for
+rifle-shooting.  Mr. Pike swore I must have had long practice; and I
+confess I was myself startled by the ease of the thing.  Of course, it's
+the knack; but one must be so made, I suppose, in order to be able to
+acquire the knack.
+
+By the end of half an hour, standing on the heaving deck and shooting at
+bottles floating on the rolling swell, I found that I broke each bottle
+at the first shot.  The supply of empty bottles giving out, Mr. Pike was
+so interested that he had the carpenter saw me a lot of small square
+blocks of hard wood.  These were more satisfactory.  A well-aimed shot
+threw them out of the water and spinning into the air, and I could use a
+single block until it had drifted out of range.  In an hour's time I
+could, shooting quickly and at short range, empty my magazine at a block
+and hit it nine times, and, on occasion, ten times, out of eleven.
+
+I might not have judged my aptitude as unusual, had I not induced Miss
+West and Wada to try their hands.  Neither had luck like mine.  I finally
+persuaded Mr. Pike, and he went behind the wheel-house so that none of
+the crew might see how poor a shot he was.  He was never able to hit the
+mark, and was guilty of the most ludicrous misses.
+
+"I never could get the hang of rifle-shooting," he announced disgustedly,
+"but when it comes to close range with a gat I'm right there.  I guess I
+might as well overhaul mine and limber it up."
+
+He went below and came back with a huge '44 automatic pistol and a
+handful of loaded clips.
+
+"Anywhere from right against the body up to ten or twelve feet away,
+holding for the stomach, it's astonishing, Mr. Pathurst, what you can do
+with a weapon like this.  Now you can't use a rifle in a mix-up.  I've
+been down and under, with a bunch giving me the boot, when I turned loose
+with this.  Talk about damage!  It ranged them the full length of their
+bodies.  One of them'd just landed his brogans on my face when I let'm
+have it.  The bullet entered just above his knee, smashed the collarbone,
+where it came out, and then clipped off an ear.  I guess that bullet's
+still going.  It took more than a full-sized man to stop it.  So I say,
+give me a good handy gat when something's doing."
+
+"Ain't you afraid you'll use all your ammunition up?" he asked anxiously
+half an hour later, as I continued to crack away with my new toy.
+
+He was quite reassured when I told him Wada had brought along fifty
+thousand rounds for me.
+
+In the midst of the shooting, two sharks came swimming around.  They were
+quite large, Mr. Pike said, and he estimated their length at fifteen
+feet.  It was Sunday morning, so that the crew, except for working the
+ship, had its time to itself, and soon the carpenter, with a rope for a
+fish-line and a great iron hook baited with a chunk of salt pork the size
+of my head, captured first one, and then the other, of the monsters.  They
+were hoisted in on the main deck.  And then I saw a spectacle of the
+cruelty of the sea.
+
+The full crew gathered about with sheath knives, hatchets, clubs, and big
+butcher knives borrowed from the galley.  I shall not give the details,
+save that they gloated and lusted, and roared and bellowed their delight
+in the atrocities they committed.  Finally, the first of the two fish was
+thrown back into the ocean with a pointed stake thrust into its upper and
+lower jaws so that it could not close its mouth.  Inevitable and
+prolonged starvation was the fate thus meted out to it.
+
+"I'll show you something, boys," Andy Fay cried, as they prepared to
+handle the second shark.
+
+The Maltese Cockney had been a most capable master of ceremonies with the
+first one.  More than anything else, I think, was I hardened against
+these brutes by what I saw them do.  In the end, the maltreated fish
+thrashed about the deck entirely eviscerated.  Nothing remained but the
+mere flesh-shell of the creature, yet it would not die.  It was amazing
+the life that lingered when all the vital organs were gone.  But more
+amazing things were to follow.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs, his arms a butcher's to the elbows, without as much as
+"by your leave," suddenly thrust a hunk of meat into my hand.  I sprang
+back, startled, and dropped it to the deck, while a gleeful howl went up
+from the two-score men.  I was shamed, despite myself.  These brutes held
+me in little respect; and, after all, human nature is so strange a
+compound that even a philosopher dislikes being held in disesteem by the
+brutes of his own species.
+
+I looked at what I had dropped.  It was the heart of the shark, and as I
+looked, there under my eyes, on the scorching deck where the pitch oozed
+from the seams, the heart pulsed with life.
+
+And I dared.  I would not permit these animals to laugh at any
+fastidiousness of mine.  I stooped and picked up the heart, and while I
+concealed and conquered my qualms I held it in my hand and felt it beat
+in my hand.
+
+At any rate, I had won a mild victory over Mulligan Jacobs; for he
+abandoned me for the more delectable diversion of torturing the shark
+that would not die.  For several minutes it had been lying quite
+motionless.  Mulligan Jacobs smote it a heavy blow on the nose with the
+flat of a hatchet, and as the thing galvanized into life and flung its
+body about the deck the little venomous man screamed in ecstasy:
+
+"The hooks are in it!--the hooks are in it!--and burnin' hot!"
+
+He squirmed and writhed with fiendish delight, and again he struck it on
+the nose and made it leap.
+
+This was too much, and I beat a retreat--feigning boredom, or cessation
+of interest, of course; and absently carrying the still throbbing heart
+in my hand.
+
+As I came upon the poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket, emerging
+from the port door of the chart-house.  The deck-chairs were on that
+side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-house in order
+to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I carried.  But, drying
+on the surface in the tropic heat and still pulsing inside, it stuck to
+my hand, so that it was a bad cast.  Instead of clearing the railing, it
+struck on the pin-rail and stuck there in the shade, and as I opened the
+door to go below and wash my hands, with a last glance I saw it pulse
+where it had fallen.
+
+When I came back it was still pulsing.  I heard a splash overside from
+the waist of the ship, and knew the carcass had been flung overboard.  I
+did not go around the chart-house and join Miss West, but stood
+enthralled by the spectacle of that heart that beat in the tropic heat.
+
+Boisterous shouts from the sailors attracted my attention.  They had all
+climbed to the top of the tall rail and were watching something outboard.
+I followed their gaze and saw the amazing thing.  That long-eviscerated
+shark was not dead.  It moved, it swam, it thrashed about, and ever it
+strove to escape from the surface of the ocean.  Sometimes it swam down
+as deep as fifty or a hundred feet, and then, still struggling to escape
+the surface, struggled involuntarily to the surface.  Each failure thus
+to escape fetched wild laughter from the men.  But why did they laugh?
+The thing was sublime, horrible, but it was not humorous.  I leave it to
+you.  What is there laughable in the sight of a pain-distraught fish
+rolling helplessly on the surface of the sea and exposing to the sun all
+its essential emptiness?
+
+I was turning away, when renewed shouting drew my gaze.  Half a dozen
+other sharks had appeared, smaller ones, nine or ten feet long.  They
+attacked their helpless comrade.  They tore him to pieces they destroyed
+him, devoured him.  I saw the last shred of him disappear down their
+maws.  He was gone, disintegrated, entombed in the living bodies of his
+kind, and already entering into the processes of digestion.  And yet,
+there, in the shade on the pin-rail, that unbelievable and monstrous
+heart beat on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+The voyage is doomed to disaster and death.  I know Mr. Pike, now, and if
+ever he discovers the identity of Mr. Mellaire, murder will be done.  Mr.
+Mellaire is not Mr. Mellaire.  He is not from Georgia.  He is from
+Virginia.  His name is Waltham--Sidney Waltham.  He is one of the
+Walthams of Virginia, a black sheep, true, but a Waltham.  Of this I am
+convinced, just as utterly as I am convinced that Mr. Pike will kill him
+if he learns who he is.
+
+Let me tell how I have discovered all this.  It was last night, shortly
+before midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff of the south-
+east trades in which we are now bowling along, close-hauled in order to
+weather Cape San Roque.  Mr. Pike had the watch, and I paced up and down
+with him while he told me old pages of his life.  He has often done this,
+when not "sea-grouched," and often he has mentioned with pride--yes, with
+reverence--a master with whom he sailed five years.  "Old Captain
+Somers," he called him--"the finest, squarest, noblest man I ever sailed
+under, sir."
+
+Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr. Pike,
+wicked old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the world and
+on the wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain Somers.
+
+"He was an old man, over seventy years old," Mr. Pike went on.  "And they
+say he'd got a touch of palsy--I hadn't seen him for years.  You see, I'd
+had to clear out from the coast because of trouble.  And that devil of a
+second mate caught him in bed late at night and beat him to death.  It
+was terrible.  They told me about it.  Right in San Francisco, on board
+the _Jason Harrison_, it happened, eleven years ago.
+
+"And do you know what they did?  First, they gave the murderer life, when
+he should have been hanged.  His plea was insanity, from having had his
+head chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook.  And when he'd
+served seven years the governor pardoned him.  He wasn't any good, but
+his people were a powerful old Virginian family, the Walthams--I guess
+you've heard of them--and they brought all kinds of pressure to bear.  His
+name was Sidney Waltham."
+
+At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes before
+the change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated by the look-
+out on the forecastle head.  Mr. Pike, under his stress of feeling, had
+stopped walking, and we stood at the break of the poop.  As chance would
+have it, Mr. Mellaire was a quarter of an hour ahead of time, and he
+climbed the poop-ladder and stood beside us while the mate concluded his
+tale.
+
+"I didn't mind it," Mr. Pike continued, "as long as he'd got life and was
+serving his time.  But when they pardoned him out after only seven years
+I swore I'd get him.  And I will.  I don't believe in God or devil, and
+it's a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do believe in hunches.  And I
+know I'm going to get him."
+
+"What will you do?" I queried.
+
+"Do?" Mr. Pike's voice was fraught with surprise that I should not know.
+"Do?  Well, what did he do to old Captain Somers?  Yet he's disappeared
+these last three years now.  I've heard neither hide nor hair of him.  But
+he's a sailor, and he'll drift back to the sea, and some day . . . "
+
+In the illumination of a match with which the second mate was lighting
+his pipe I saw Mr. Pike's gorilla arms and huge clenched paws raised to
+heaven, and his face convulsed and working.  Also, in that brief moment
+of light, I saw that the second mate's hand which held the match was
+shaking.
+
+"And I ain't never seen even a photo of him," Mr. Pike added.  "But I've
+got a general idea of his looks, and he's got a mark unmistakable.  I
+could know him by it in the dark.  All I'd have to do is feel it.  Some
+day I'll stick my fingers into that mark."
+
+"What did you say, sir, was the captain's name?" Mr. Mellaire asked
+casually.
+
+"Somers--old Captain Somers," Mr. Pike answered.
+
+Mr. Mellaire repeated the name aloud several times, and then hazarded:
+
+"Didn't he command the _Lammermoor_ thirty years ago?"
+
+"That's the man."
+
+"I thought I recognized him.  I lay at anchor in a ship next to his in
+Table Bay that time ago."
+
+"Oh, the wickedness of the world, the wickedness of the world," Mr. Pike
+muttered as he turned and strode away.
+
+I said good-night to the second mate and had started to go below, when he
+called to me in a low voice, "Mr. Pathurst!"
+
+I stopped, and then he said, hurriedly and confusedly:
+
+"Never mind, sir . . . I beg your pardon . . . I--I changed my mind."
+
+Below, lying in my bunk, I found myself unable to read.  My mind was bent
+on returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my will, the
+most gruesome speculations kept suggesting themselves.
+
+And then came Mr. Mellaire.  He had slipped down the booby hatch into the
+big after-room and thence through the hallway to my room.  He entered
+noiselessly, on clumsy tiptoes, and pressed his finger warningly to his
+lips.  Not until he was beside my bunk did he speak, and then it was in a
+whisper.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, Mr. Pathurst . . . I--I beg your pardon; but,
+you see, sir, I was just passing, and seeing you awake I . . . I thought
+it would not inconvenience you to . . . you see, I thought I might just
+as well prefer a small favour . . . seeing that I would not inconvenience
+you, sir . . . I . . . I . . . "
+
+I waited for him to proceed, and in the pause that ensued, while he
+licked his dry lips with his tongue, the thing ambushed in his skull
+peered at me through his eyes and seemed almost on the verge of leaping
+out and pouncing upon me.
+
+"Well, sir," he began again, this time more coherently, "it's just a
+little thing--foolish on my part, of course--a whim, so to say--but you
+will remember, near the beginning of the voyage, I showed you a scar on
+my head . . . a really small affair, sir, which I contracted in a
+misadventure.  It amounts to a deformity, which it is my fancy to
+conceal.  Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for
+instance, know that I carried such a deformity.  A man is a man, sir--you
+understand--and you have not spoken of it to her?"
+
+"No," I replied.  "It just happens that I have not."
+
+"Nor to anybody else?--to, say, Captain West?--or, say, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"No, I haven't mentioned it to anybody," I averred.
+
+He could not conceal the relief he experienced.  The perturbation went
+out of his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back deeper into
+the recess of his skull.
+
+"The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will not
+mention that little matter to anybody.  I suppose" (he smiled, and his
+voice was superlatively suave) "it is vanity on my part--you understand,
+I am sure."
+
+I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that I
+desired to resume my reading.
+
+"I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?"  His whole voice and
+manner had changed.  It was practically a command, and I could almost see
+fangs, bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I fancied
+dwelt behind his eyes.
+
+"Certainly," I answered coldly.
+
+"Thank you, sir--I thank you," he said, and, without more ado, tiptoed
+from the room.
+
+Of course I did not read.  How could I?  Nor did I sleep.  My mind ran
+on, and on, and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly before
+five, did I sink into my first doze.
+
+One thing is very evident.  Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer of
+Captain Somers is on board the _Elsinore_.  He has never glimpsed that
+prodigious fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire's, or, rather, Sidney
+Waltham's, skull.  And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike.  And I
+know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate.  And I
+understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within and peers
+out through the eyes.  I have recognized the same thing in the three
+gangsters for'ard.  Like the second mate, they are prison birds.  The
+restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life has developed in
+all of them terrible other selves.
+
+Yes, and another thing is very evident.  On board this ship, driving now
+through the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn, are all
+the elements of sea tragedy and horror.  We are freighted with human
+dynamite that is liable at any moment to blow our tiny floating world to
+fragments.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+The days slip by.  The south-east trade is brisk and small splashes of
+sea occasionally invade my open ports.  Mr. Pike's room was soaked
+yesterday.  This is the most exciting thing that has happened for some
+time.  The gangsters rule in the forecastle.  Larry and Shorty have had a
+harmless _fight_.  The hooks continue to burn in Mulligan Jacobs's brain.
+Charles Davis resides alone in his little steel room, coming out only to
+get his food from the galley.  Miss West plays and sings, doctors Possum,
+launders, and is for ever otherwise busy with her fancy work.  Mr. Pike
+runs the phonograph every other evening in the second dog-watch.  Mr.
+Mellaire hides the cleft in his head.  I keep his secret.  And Captain
+West, more remote than ever, sits in the draught of wind in the twilight
+cabin.
+
+We are now thirty-seven days at sea, in which time, until to-day, we have
+not sighted a vessel.  And to-day, at one time, no less than six vessels
+were visible from the deck.  Not until I saw these ships was I able
+thoroughly to realize how lonely this ocean is.
+
+Mr. Pike tells me we are several hundred miles off the South American
+coast.  And yet, only the other day, it seems, we were scarcely more
+distant from Africa.  A big velvety moth fluttered aboard this morning,
+and we are filled with conjecture.  How possibly could it have come from
+the South American coast these hundreds of miles in the teeth of the
+trades?
+
+The Southern Cross has been visible, of course, for weeks; the North Star
+has disappeared behind the bulge of the earth; and the Great Bear, at its
+highest, is very low.  Soon it, too, will be gone and we shall be raising
+the Magellan Clouds.
+
+I remember the fight between Larry and Shorty.  Wada reports that Mr.
+Pike watched it for some time, until, becoming incensed at their
+awkwardness, he clouted both of them with his open hands and made them
+stop, announcing that until they could make a better showing he intended
+doing all the fighting on the _Elsinore_ himself.
+
+It is a feat beyond me to realize that he is sixty-nine years old.  And
+when I look at the tremendous build of him and at his fearful,
+man-handling hands, I conjure up a vision of him avenging Captain
+Somers's murder.
+
+Life is cruel.  Amongst the _Elsinore's_ five thousand tons of coal are
+thousands of rats.  There is no way for them to get out of their steel-
+walled prison, for all the ventilators are guarded with stout wire-mesh.
+On her previous voyage, loaded with barley, they increased and
+multiplied.  Now they are imprisoned in the coal, and cannibalism is what
+must occur among them.  Mr. Pike says that when we reach Seattle there
+will be a dozen or a score of survivors, huge fellows, the strongest and
+fiercest.  Sometimes, passing the mouth of one ventilator that is in the
+after wall of the chart-house, I can hear their plaintive squealing and
+crying from far beneath in the coal.
+
+Other and luckier rats are in the 'tween decks for'ard, where all the
+spare suits of sails are stored.  They come out and run about the deck at
+night, steal food from the galley, and lap up the dew.  Which reminds me
+that Mr. Pike will no longer look at Possum.  It seems, under his
+suggestion, that Wada trapped a rat in the donkey-engine room.  Wada
+swears that it was the father of all rats, and that, by actual
+measurement, it scaled eighteen inches from nose to the tip of tail.
+Also, it seems that Mr. Pike and Wada, with the door shut in the former's
+room, pitted the rat against Possum, and that Possum was licked.  They
+were compelled to kill the rat themselves, while Possum, when all was
+over, lay down and had a fit.
+
+Now Mr. Pike abhors a coward, and his disgust with Possum is profound.  He
+no longer plays with the puppy, nor even speaks to him, and, whenever he
+passes him on the deck, glowers sourly at him.
+
+I have been reading up the South Atlantic Sailing Directions, and I find
+that we are now entering the most beautiful sunset region in the world.
+And this evening we were favoured with a sample.  I was in my quarters,
+overhauling my books, when Miss West called to me from the foot of the
+chart-house stairs:
+
+"Mr. Pathurst!--Come quick!  Oh, do come quick!  You can't afford to miss
+it!"
+
+Half the sky, from the zenith to the western sea-line, was an astonishing
+sheet of pure, pale, even gold.  And through this sheen, on the horizon,
+burned the sun, a disc of richer gold.  The gold of the sky grew more
+golden, then tarnished before our eyes and began to glow faintly with
+red.  As the red deepened, a mist spread over the whole sheet of gold and
+the burning yellow sun.  Turner was never guilty of so audacious an orgy
+in gold-mist.
+
+Presently, along the horizon, entirely completing the circle of sea and
+sky, the tight-packed shapes of the trade wind clouds began to show
+through the mist; and as they took form they spilled with rose-colour at
+their upper edges, while their bases were a pulsing, bluish-white.  I say
+it advisedly.  All the colours of this display _pulsed_.
+
+As the gold-mist continued to clear away, the colours became garish,
+bold; the turquoises went into greens and the roses turned to the red of
+blood.  And the purple and indigo of the long swells of sea were bronzed
+with the colour-riot in the sky, while across the water, like gigantic
+serpents, crawled red and green sky-reflections.  And then all the
+gorgeousness quickly dulled, and the warm, tropic darkness drew about us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+The _Elsinore_ is truly the ship of souls, the world in miniature; and,
+because she is such a small world, cleaving this vastitude of ocean as
+our larger world cleaves space, the strange juxtapositions that
+continually occur are startling.
+
+For instance, this afternoon on the poop.  Let me describe it.  Here was
+Miss West, in a crisp duck sailor suit, immaculately white, open at the
+throat, where, under the broad collar, was knotted a man-of-war black
+silk neckerchief.  Her smooth-groomed hair, a trifle rebellious in the
+breeze, was glorious.  And here was I, in white ducks, white shoes, and
+white silk shirt, as immaculate and well-tended as she.  The steward was
+just bringing the pretty tea-service for Miss West, and in the background
+Wada hovered.
+
+We had been discussing philosophy--or, rather, I had been feeling her
+out; and from a sketch of Spinoza's anticipations of the modern mind,
+through the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in
+physics of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as usual,
+to De Casseres, whom I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled orders to the
+watch.
+
+"'In this rise into the azure of pure perception, attainable only by a
+very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born,'."  I was quoting.
+"'Life is no longer good or evil.  It is a perpetual play of forces
+without beginning or end.  The freed Intellect merges itself with the
+World-Will and partakes of its essence, which is not a moral essence but
+an aesthetic essence . . . "
+
+And at this moment the watch swarmed on to the poop to haul on the port-
+braces of the mizzen-sky-sail, royal and topgallant-sail.  The sailors
+passed us, or toiled close to us, with lowered eyes.  They did not look
+at us, so far removed from them were we.  It was this contrast that
+caught my fancy.  Here were the high and low, slaves and masters, beauty
+and ugliness, cleanness and filth.  Their feet were bare and scaled with
+patches of tar and pitch.  Their unbathed bodies were garmented in the
+meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty, ragged, and sparse.  Each one had on
+but two garments--dungaree trousers and a shoddy cotton shirt.
+
+And we, in our comfortable deck-chairs, our two servants at our backs,
+the quintessence of elegant leisure, sipped delicate tea from beautiful,
+fragile cups, and looked on at these wretched ones whose labour made
+possible the journey of our little world.  We did not speak to them, nor
+recognize their existence, any more than would they have dared speak to
+us.
+
+And Miss West, with the appraising eye of a plantation mistress for the
+condition of her field slaves, looked them over.
+
+"You see how they have fleshed up," she said, as they coiled the last
+turns of the ropes over the pins and faded away for'ard off the poop.  "It
+is the regular hours, the good weather, the hard work, the open air, the
+sufficient food, and the absence of whisky.  And they will keep in this
+fettle until they get off the Horn.  And then you will see them go down
+from day to day.  A winter passage of the Horn is always a severe strain
+on the men.
+
+"But then, once we are around and in the good weather of the Pacific, you
+will see them gain again from day to day.  And when we reach Seattle they
+will be in splendid shape.  Only they will go ashore, drink up their
+wages in several days, and ship away on other vessels in precisely the
+same sodden, miserable condition that they were in when they sailed with
+us from Baltimore."
+
+And just then Captain West came out the chart-house door, strolled by for
+a single turn up and down, and with a smile and a word for us and an all-
+observant eye for the ship, the trim of her sails, the wind, and the sky,
+and the weather promise, went back through the chart-house door--the
+blond Aryan master, the king, the Samurai.
+
+And I finished sipping my tea of delicious and most expensive aroma, and
+our slant-eyed, dark-skinned servitors carried the pretty gear away, and
+I read, continuing De Casseres:
+
+"'Instinct wills, creates, carries on the work of the species.  The
+Intellect destroys, negatives, satirizes and ends in pure nihilism,
+instinct creates life, endlessly, hurling forth profusely and blindly its
+clowns, tragedians and comedians.  Intellect remains the eternal
+spectator of the play.  It participates at will, but never gives itself
+wholly to the fine sport.  The Intellect, freed from the trammels of the
+personal will, soars into the ether of perception, where Instinct follows
+it in a thousand disguises, seeking to draw it down to earth.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+We are now south of Rio and working south.  We are out of the latitude of
+the trades, and the wind is capricious.  Rain squalls and wind squalls
+vex the _Elsinore_.  One hour we may be rolling sickeningly in a dead
+calm, and the next hour we may be dashing fourteen knots through the
+water and taking off sail as fast as the men can clew up and lower away.
+A night of calm, when sleep is well-nigh impossible in the sultry, muggy
+air, may be followed by a day of blazing sun and an oily swell from the
+south'ard, connoting great gales in that area of ocean we are sailing
+toward--or all day long the _Elsinore_, under an overcast sky, royals and
+sky sails furled, may plunge and buck under wind-pressure into a short
+and choppy head-sea.
+
+And all this means work for the men.  Taking Mr. Pike's judgment, they
+are very inadequate, though by this time they know the ropes.  He growls
+and grumbles, and snorts and sneers whenever he watches them doing
+anything.  To-day, at eleven in the morning, the wind was so violent,
+continuing in greater gusts after having come in a great gust, that Mr.
+Pike ordered the mainsail taken off.  The great crojack was already off.
+But the watch could not clew up the mainsail, and, after much vain sing-
+songing and pull-hauling, the watch below was routed out to bear a hand.
+
+"My God!" Mr. Pike groaned to me.  "Two watches for a rag like that when
+half a decent watch could do it!  Look at that preventer bosun of mine!"
+
+Poor Nancy!  He looked the saddest, sickest, bleakest creature I had ever
+seen.  He was so wretched, so miserable, so helpless.  And Sundry Buyers
+was just as impotent.  The expression on his face was of pain and
+hopelessness, and as he pressed his abdomen he lumbered futilely about,
+ever seeking something he might do and ever failing to find it.  He
+pottered.  He would stand and stare at one rope for a minute or so at a
+time, following it aloft with his eyes through the maze of ropes and
+stabs and gears with all the intentness of a man working out an intricate
+problem.  Then, holding his hand against his stomach, he would lumber on
+a few steps and select another rope for study.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," Mr. Pike lamented.  "How can one drive with bosuns
+like that and a crew like that?  Just the same, if I was captain of this
+ship I'd drive 'em.  I'd show 'em what drive was, if I had to lose a few
+of them.  And when they grow weak off the Horn what'll we do?  It'll be
+both watches all the time, which will weaken them just that much the
+faster."
+
+Evidently this winter passage of the Horn is all that one has been led to
+expect from reading the narratives of the navigators.  Iron men like the
+two mates are very respectful of "Cape Stiff," as they call that
+uttermost tip of the American continent.  Speaking of the two mates, iron-
+made and iron-mouthed that they are, it is amusing that in really serious
+moments both of them curse with "Oh dear, oh dear."
+
+In the spells of calm I take great delight in the little rifle.  I have
+already fired away five thousand rounds, and have come to consider myself
+an expert.  Whatever the knack of shooting may be, I've got it.  When I
+get back I shall take up target practice.  It is a neat, deft sport.
+
+Not only is Possum afraid of the sails and of rats, but he is afraid of
+rifle-fire, and at the first discharge goes yelping and ki-yi-ing below.
+The dislike Mr. Pike has developed for the poor little puppy is
+ludicrous.  He even told me that if it were his dog he'd throw it
+overboard for a target.  Just the same, he is an affectionate,
+heart-warming little rascal, and has already crept so deep into my heart
+that I am glad Miss West did not accept him.
+
+And--oh!--he insists on sleeping with me on top the bedding; a proceeding
+which has scandalized the mate.  "I suppose he'll be using your
+toothbrush next," Mr. Pike growled at me.  But the puppy loves my
+companionship, and is never happier than when on the bed with me.  Yet
+the bed is not entirely paradise, for Possum is badly frightened when
+ours is the lee side and the seas pound and smash against the glass
+ports.  Then the little beggar, electric with fear to every hair tip,
+crouches and snarls menacingly and almost at the same time whimpers
+appeasingly at the storm-monster outside.
+
+"Father _knows_ the sea," Miss West said to me this afternoon.  "He
+understands it, and he loves it."
+
+"Or it may be habit," I ventured.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"He does know it.  And he loves it.  That is why he has come back to it.
+All his people before him were sea folk.  His grandfather, Anthony West,
+made forty-six voyages between 1801 and 1847.  And his father, Robert,
+sailed master to the north-west coast before the gold days and was
+captain of some of the fastest Cape Horn clippers after the gold
+discovery.  Elijah West, father's great-grandfather, was a privateersman
+in the Revolution.  He commanded the armed brig _New Defence_.  And, even
+before that, Elijah's father, in turn, and Elijah's father's father, were
+masters and owners on long-voyage merchant adventures.
+
+"Anthony West, in 1813 and 1814, commanded the _David Bruce_, with
+letters of marque.  He was half-owner, with Gracie & Sons as the other
+half-owners.  She was a two-hundred-ton schooner, built right up in
+Maine.  She carried a long eighteen-pounder, two ten-pounders, and ten
+six-pounders, and she sailed like a witch.  She ran the blockade off
+Newport and got away to the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay.  And,
+do you know, though she only cost twelve thousand dollars all told, she
+took over three hundred thousand dollars of British prizes.  A brother of
+his was on the _Wasp_.
+
+"So, you see, the sea is in our blood.  She is our mother.  As far back
+as we can trace all our line was born to the sea."  She laughed and went
+on.  "We've pirates and slavers in our family, and all sorts of
+disreputable sea-rovers.  Old Ezra West, just how far back I don't
+remember, was executed for piracy and his body hung in chains at
+Plymouth.
+
+"The sea is father's blood.  And he knows, well, a ship, as you would
+know a dog or a horse.  Every ship he sails has a distinct personality
+for him.  I have watched him, in high moments, and _seen_ him think.  But
+oh! the times I have seen him when he does not think--when he _feels_ and
+knows everything without thinking at all.  Really, with all that
+appertains to the sea and ships, he is an artist.  There is no other word
+for it."
+
+"You think a great deal of your father," I remarked.
+
+"He is the most wonderful man I have ever known," she replied.  "Remember,
+you are not seeing him at his best.  He has never been the same since
+mother's death.  If ever a man and woman were one, they were."  She broke
+off, then concluded abruptly.  "You don't know him.  You don't know him
+at all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+"I think we are going to have a fine sunset," Captain West remarked last
+evening.
+
+Miss West and I abandoned our rubber of cribbage and hastened on deck.
+The sunset had not yet come, but all was preparing.  As we gazed we could
+see the sky gathering the materials, grouping the gray clouds in long
+lines and towering masses, spreading its palette with slow-growing,
+glowing tints and sudden blobs of colour.
+
+"It's the Golden Gate!" Miss West cried, indicating the west.  "See!
+We're just inside the harbour.  Look to the south there.  If that isn't
+the sky-line of San Francisco!  There's the Call Building, and there, far
+down, the Ferry Tower, and surely that is the Fairmount."  Her eyes roved
+back through the opening between the cloud masses, and she clapped her
+hands.  "It's a sunset within a sunset!  See!  The Farallones!"--swimming
+in a miniature orange and red sunset all their own.  "Isn't it the Golden
+Gate, and San Francisco, and the Farallones?"  She appealed to Mr. Pike,
+who, leaning near, on the poop-rail, was divided between gazing sourly at
+Nancy pottering on the main deck and sourly at Possum, who, on the
+bridge, crouched with terror each time the crojack flapped emptily above
+him.
+
+The mate turned his head and favoured the sky picture with a solemn
+stare.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he growled.  "It may look like the Farallones to you,
+but to me it looks like a battleship coming right in the Gate with a bone
+in its teeth at a twenty-knot clip."
+
+Sure enough.  The floating Farallones had metamorphosed into a giant
+warship.
+
+Then came the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green.  It was
+green, green, green--the blue-green of the springing year, and sere and
+yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn.  There were orange green,
+gold green, and a copper green.  And all these greens were rich green
+beyond description; and yet the richness and the greenness passed even as
+we gazed upon it, going out of the gray clouds and into the sea, which
+assumed the exquisite golden pink of polished copper, while the hollows
+of the smooth and silken ripples were touched by a most ethereal pea
+green.
+
+The gray clouds became a long, low swathe of ruby red, or garnet red--such
+as one sees in a glass of heavy burgundy when held to the light.  There
+was such depth to this red!  And, below it, separated from the main
+colour-mass by a line of gray-white fog, or line of sea, was another and
+smaller streak of ruddy-coloured wine.
+
+I strolled across the poop to the port side.
+
+"Oh!  Come back!  Look!  Look!" Miss West cried to me.
+
+"What's the use?" I answered.  "I've something just as good over here."
+
+She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike's face.
+
+The eastern heavens were equally spectacular.  That quarter of the sky
+was sheer and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which faded,
+changed, through every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose, all
+trembling, palpitating, with misty blue tinting into pink.  The
+reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon the water made of the sea a
+glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue, Nile-green, and salmon-
+pink.  It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that veneered and flossed
+the softly moving, wavy water.
+
+And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted
+mist of the sky-shell.
+
+In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely different
+sunset--what would be accounted a very excellent orange-and-red sunset
+anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and tinted on all
+their under edges.
+
+"Huh!" Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our fresh
+discovery.  "Look at the sunset I got here to the north.  It ain't doing
+so badly now, I leave it to you."
+
+And it wasn't.  The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and
+cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the
+horizon to the zenith.  It was all amazing.  Four sunsets at the one time
+in the sky!  Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a sunset
+distinctly its own.
+
+And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still misty,
+wept tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea.  And then
+came the hush of darkness and the night, and we came to ourselves, out of
+reverie, sated with beauty, leaning toward each other as we leaned upon
+the rail side by side.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I never grow tired of watching Captain West.  In a way he bears a sort of
+resemblance to several of Washington's portraits.  He is six feet of
+aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and stately
+grace of movement.  His thinness is almost ascetic.  In appearance and
+manner he is the perfect old-type New England gentleman.
+
+He has the same gray eyes as his daughter, although his are genial rather
+than warm; and his eyes have the same trick of smiling.  His skin is
+pinker than hers, and his brows and lashes are fairer.  But he seems
+removed beyond passion, or even simple enthusiasm.  Miss West is firm,
+like her father; but there is warmth in her firmness.  He is clean, he is
+sweet and courteous; but he is coolly sweet, coolly courteous.  With all
+his certain graciousness, in cabin or on deck, so far as his social
+equals are concerned, his graciousness is cool, elevated, thin.
+
+He is the perfect master of the art of doing nothing.  He never reads,
+except the Bible; yet he is never bored.  Often, I note him in a deck-
+chair, studying his perfect finger-nails, and, I'll swear, not seeing
+them at all.  Miss West says he loves the sea.  And I ask myself a
+thousand times, "But how?" He shows no interest in any phase of the sea.
+Although he called our attention to the glorious sunset I have just
+described, he did not remain on deck to enjoy it.  He sat below, in the
+big leather chair, not reading, not dozing, but merely gazing straight
+before him at nothing.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The days pass, and the seasons pass.  We left Baltimore at the tail-end
+of winter, went into spring and on through summer, and now we are in fall
+weather and urging our way south to the winter of Cape Horn.  And as we
+double the Cape and proceed north, we shall go through spring and
+summer--a long summer--pursuing the sun north through its declination and
+arriving at Seattle in summer.  And all these seasons have occurred, and
+will have occurred, in the space of five months.
+
+Our white ducks are gone, and, in south latitude thirty-five, we are
+wearing the garments of a temperate clime.  I notice that Wada has given
+me heavier underclothes and heavier pyjamas, and that Possum, of nights,
+is no longer content with the top of the bed but must crawl underneath
+the bed-clothes.
+
+* * * * *
+
+We are now off the Plate, a region notorious for storms, and Mr. Pike is
+on the lookout for a pampero.  Captain West does not seem to be on the
+lookout for anything; yet I notice that he spends longer hours on deck
+when the sky and barometer are threatening.
+
+Yesterday we had a hint of Plate weather, and to-day an awesome fiasco of
+the same.  The hint came last evening between the twilight and the dark.
+There was practically no wind, and the _Elsinore_, just maintaining
+steerage way by means of intermittent fans of air from the north,
+floundered exasperatingly in a huge glassy swell that rolled up as an
+echo from some blown-out storm to the south.
+
+Ahead of us, arising with the swiftness of magic, was a dense
+slate-blackness.  I suppose it was cloud-formation, but it bore no
+semblance to clouds.  It was merely and sheerly a blackness that towered
+higher and higher until it overhung us, while it spread to right and
+left, blotting out half the sea.
+
+And still the light puffs from the north filled our sails; and still, as
+the _Elsinore_ floundered on the huge, smooth swells and the sails
+emptied and flapped a hollow thunder, we moved slowly towards that
+ominous blackness.  In the cast, in what was quite distinctly an active
+thunder cloud, the lightning fairly winked, while the blackness in front
+of us was rent with blobs and flashes of lightning.
+
+The last puffs left us, and in the hushes, between the rumbles of the
+nearing thunder, the voices of the men aloft on the yards came to one's
+ear as if they were right beside one instead of being hundreds of feet
+away and up in the air.  That they were duly impressed by what was
+impending was patent from the earnestness with which they worked.  Both
+watches toiled under both mates, and Captain West strolled the poop in
+his usual casual way, and gave no orders at all, save in low conventional
+tones, when Mr. Pike came upon the poop and conferred with him.
+
+Miss West, having deserted the scene five minutes before, returned, a
+proper sea-woman, clad in oil-skins, sou'wester, and long sea-boots.  She
+ordered me, quite peremptorily, to do the same.  But I could not bring
+myself to leave the deck for fear of missing something, so I compromised
+by having Wada bring my storm-gear to me.
+
+And then the wind came, smack out of the blackness, with the abruptness
+of thunder and accompanied by the most diabolical thunder.  And with the
+rain and thunder came the blackness.  It was tangible.  It drove past us
+in the bellowing wind like so much stuff that one could feel.  Blackness
+as well as wind impacted on us.  There is no other way to describe it
+than by the old, ancient old, way of saying one could not see his hand
+before his face.
+
+"Isn't it splendid!" Miss West shouted into my ear, close beside me, as
+we clung to the railing of the break of the poop.
+
+"Superb!" I shouted back, my lips to her ear, so that her hair tickled my
+face.
+
+And, I know not why--it must have been spontaneous with both of us--in
+that shouting blackness of wind, as we clung to the rail to avoid being
+blown away, our hands went out to each other and my hand and hers gripped
+and pressed and then held mutually to the rail.
+
+"Daughter of Herodias," I commented grimly to myself; but my hand did not
+leave hers.
+
+"What is happening?" I shouted in her ear.
+
+"We've lost way," came her answer.  "I think we're caught aback!  The
+wheel's up, but she could not steer!"
+
+The Gabriel voice of the Samurai rang out.  "Hard over?" was his mellow
+storm-call to the man at the wheel.  "Hard over, sir," came the
+helmsman's reply, vague, cracked with strain, and smothered.
+
+Came the lightning, before us, behind us, on every side, bathing us in
+flaming minutes at a time.  And all the while we were deafened by the
+unceasing uproar of thunder.  It was a weird sight--far aloft the black
+skeleton of spars and masts from which the sails had been removed; lower
+down, the sailors clinging like monstrous bugs as they passed the gaskets
+and furled; beneath them the few set sails, filled backward against the
+masts, gleaming whitely, wickedly, evilly, in the fearful illumination;
+and, at the bottom, the deck and bridge and houses of the _Elsinore_, and
+a tangled riff-raff of flying ropes, and clumps and bunches of swaying,
+pulling, hauling, human creatures.
+
+It was a great moment, the master's moment--caught all aback with all our
+bulk and tonnage and infinitude of gear, and our heaven-aspiring masts
+two hundred feet above our heads.  And our master was there, in sheeting
+flame, slender, casual, imperturbable, with two men--one of them a
+murderer--under him to pass on and enforce his will, and with a horde of
+inefficients and weaklings to obey that will, and pull, and haul, and by
+the sheer leverages of physics manipulate our floating world so that it
+would endure this fury of the elements.
+
+What happened next, what was done, I do not know, save that now and again
+I heard the Gabriel voice; for the darkness came, and the rain in
+pouring, horizontal sheets.  It filled my mouth and strangled my lungs as
+if I had fallen overboard.  It seemed to drive up as well as down,
+piercing its way under my sou'wester, through my oilskins, down my tight-
+buttoned collar, and into my sea-boots.  I was dizzied, obfuscated, by
+all this onslaught of thunder, lightning, wind, blackness, and water.  And
+yet the master, near to me, there on the poop, lived and moved serenely
+in all, voicing his wisdom and will to the wisps of creatures who obeyed
+and by their brute, puny strength pulled braces, slacked sheets, dragged
+courses, swung yards and lowered them, hauled on buntlines and clewlines,
+smoothed and gasketed the huge spreads of canvas.
+
+How it happened I know not, but Miss West and I crouched together,
+clinging to the rail and to each other in the shelter of the thrumming
+weather-cloth.  My arm was about her and fast to the railing; her
+shoulder pressed close against me, and by one hand she held tightly to
+the lapel of my oilskin.
+
+An hour later we made our way across the poop to the chart-house, helping
+each other to maintain footing as the _Elsinore_ plunged and bucked in
+the rising sea and was pressed over and down by the weight of wind on her
+few remaining set sails.  The wind, which had lulled after the rain, had
+risen in recurrent gusts to storm violence.  But all was well with the
+gallant ship.  The crisis was past, and the ship lived, and we lived, and
+with streaming faces and bright eyes we looked at each other and laughed
+in the bright light of the chart-room.
+
+"Who can blame one for loving the sea?" Miss West cried out exultantly,
+as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had gone adrift in the
+turmoil.  "And the men of the sea!" she cried.  "The masters of the sea!
+You saw my father . . . "
+
+"He is a king," I said.
+
+"He is a king," she repeated after me.
+
+And the _Elsinore_ lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side,
+so that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the
+wall.
+
+I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed the
+open door to the cabin I glanced in.  There sat Captain West, whom I had
+thought still on deck.  His storm-trappings were removed, his sea-boots
+replaced by slippers; and he leaned back in the big leather chair, eyes
+wide open, beholding visions in the curling smoke of a cigar against a
+background of wildly reeling cabin wall.
+
+It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco.  Last
+night's was a real pampero--though a mild one.  To-day's promised to be a
+far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke.  The wind,
+during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had all our
+topgallant-sails set.  By ten we were rolling in a dead calm.  By eleven
+the stuff began making up ominously in the south'ard.
+
+The overcast sky closed down.  Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the
+cloud-zenith.  The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half a
+mile away.  The _Elsinore_ was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and
+sea.  The lightning played.  Sky and horizon drew so close that the
+_Elsinore_ seemed on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it, sucked
+up by it.
+
+Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked lightning,
+and the wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green.  The rain, beginning
+gently, in dead calm, grew into a deluge of enormous streaming drops.  It
+grew darker and darker, a green darkness, and in the cabin, although it
+was midday, Wada and the steward lighted lamps.  The lightning came
+closer and closer, until the ship was enveloped in it.  The green
+darkness was continually a-tremble with flame, through which broke
+greater illuminations of forked lightning.  These became more violent as
+the rain lessened, and, so absolutely were we centred in this electrical
+maelstrom, there was no connecting any chain or flash or fork of
+lightning with any particular thunder-clap.  The atmosphere all about us
+paled and flamed.  Such a crashing and smashing!  We looked every moment
+for the _Elsinore_ to be struck.  And never had I seen such colours in
+lightning.  Although from moment to moment we were dazzled by the greater
+bolts, there persisted always a tremulous, pulsing lesser play of light,
+sometimes softly blue, at other times a thin purple that quivered on into
+a thousand shades of lavender.
+
+And there was no wind.  No wind came.  Nothing happened.  The _Elsinore_,
+naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and crojack
+furled, was prepared for anything.  Her lower-topsails hung in limp
+emptiness from the yards, heavy with rain and flapping soggily when she
+rolled.  The cloud mass thinned, the day brightened, the green blackness
+passed into gray twilight, the lightning eased, the thunder moved along
+away from us, and there was no wind.  In half an hour the sun was
+shining, the thunder muttered intermittently along the horizon, and the
+_Elsinore_ still rolled in a hush of air.
+
+"You can't tell, sir," Mr. Pike growled to me.  "Thirty years ago I was
+dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come on just as
+that come on."
+
+It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on the
+poop to relieve the mate, stood beside me.
+
+"One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world," he concurred.
+"Eighteen years ago the Plate gave it to me--lost half our sticks, twenty
+hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered.  I was two days in
+the boat before an English tramp picked us up.  And none of the other
+boats ever was picked up."
+
+"The _Elsinore_ behaved very well last night," I put in cheerily.
+
+"Oh, hell, that wasn't nothing," Mr. Pike grumbled.  "Wait till you see a
+real pampero.  It's a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one, 'll be
+glad when we get across It.  I'd sooner have a dozen Cape Horn snorters
+than one of these.  How about you, Mr. Mellaire?"
+
+"Same here, sir," he answered.  "Those sou'-westers are honest.  You know
+what to expect.  But here you never know.  The best of ship-masters can
+get tripped up off the Plate."
+
+   "'As I've found out . . .
+   Beyond a doubt,"
+
+Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb's _Celeste_, as he went down the ladder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the
+Argentine.  Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden,
+flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while in
+the east was painted a second sunset--a reflection, perhaps, of the
+first.  At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds that shed
+soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea.
+
+And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the west.
+Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier, spacious
+and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and
+more celestial than that of the Colorado.  The clouds took on the same
+stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the hollows were
+filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands.
+
+The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the
+dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the
+pampas of the Argentine.
+
+And our sunset to-night--I am writing this at midnight, as I sit propped
+in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the _Elsinore_ wallows damnably
+in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn region,
+where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow.  But our sunset.  Turner
+might have perpetrated it.  The west was as if a painter had stood off
+and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green canvas.  On this green
+background of sky the clouds spilled and crumpled.
+
+But such a background!  Such an orgy of green!  No shade of green was
+missing in the interstices, large and small, between the milky, curdled
+clouds--Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a thousand
+shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful olive-green
+that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.
+
+During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
+pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow.  A little later, when the sun
+was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds smouldered a wine-
+red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged all the fading greens
+with its sanguinary hue.  The clouds themselves flushed to rose of all
+shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of pale rose radiated toward
+the zenith.  These deepened rapidly into flaunting rose-flame and burned
+long in the slow-closing twilight.
+
+And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in my
+brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my head, and
+the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to rope and pull
+and haul.  More weather is making, and from the way sail is being taken
+in it cannot be far off.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
+calm and sickly swell.  Miss West says the barometer is down, but that
+the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to anything.
+Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the _Elsinore_, under bare poles
+to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it may well be that they
+will be crowding on canvas in another hour.
+
+Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails, and
+the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai came on
+deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then spoke in an
+undertone to Mr. Pike.  Mr. Pike did not like it.  To me, a tyro, it was
+evident that he disagreed with his master.  Nevertheless, his voice went
+out in a snarl aloft to the men on the royal-yards to make all fast
+again.  Then it was clewlines and buntlines and lowering of yards as the
+topgallant-sails were stripped off.  The crojack was taken in, and some
+of the outer fore-and-aft handsails, whose order of names I can never
+remember.
+
+A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear sky.  I
+could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased.  The Samurai had been
+mistaken.  And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked topgallant-
+and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might well be carrying
+sail.  I was quite convinced that the Plate had fooled Captain West.  So
+was Miss West convinced, and, being a favoured person like myself, she
+frankly told me so.
+
+"Father will be setting sail in half an hour," she prophesied.
+
+What superior weather-sense Captain West possesses I know not, save that
+it is his by Samurai right.  The sky, as I have said, was clear.  The air
+was brittle--sparkling gloriously in the windy sun.  And yet, behold, in
+a brief quarter of an hour, the change that took place.  I had just
+returned from a trip below, and Miss West was venting her scorn on the
+River Plate and promising to go below to the sewing-machine, when we
+heard Mr. Pike groan.  It was a whimsical groan of disgust, contrition,
+and acknowledgment of inferiority before the master.
+
+"Here comes the whole River Plate," was what he groaned.
+
+Following his gaze to the south-west, we saw it coming.  It was a cloud-
+mass that blotted out the sunlight and the day.  It seemed to swell and
+belch and roll over and over on itself as it advanced with a rapidity
+that told of enormous wind behind it and in it.  Its speed was headlong,
+terrific; and, beneath it, covering the sea, advancing with it, was a
+gray bank of mist.
+
+Captain West spoke to the mate, who bawled the order along, and the
+watch, reinforced by the watch below, began dewing up the mainsail and
+foresail and climbing into the rigging.
+
+"Keep off!  Put your wheel over!  Hard over!" Captain West called gently
+to the helmsman.
+
+And the big wheel spun around, and the _Elsinore's_ bow fell off so that
+she might not be caught aback by the onslaught of wind.
+
+Thunder rode in that rushing, rolling blackness of cloud; and it was rent
+by lightning as it fell upon us.
+
+Then it was rain, wind, obscureness of gloom, and lightning.  I caught a
+glimpse of the men on the lower-yards as they were blotted from view and
+as the _Elsinore_ heeled over and down.  There were fifteen men of them
+to each yard, and the gaskets were well passed ere we were struck.  How
+they regained the deck I do not know, I never saw; for the _Elsinore_,
+under only upper- and lower-topsails, lay down on her side, her port-rail
+buried in the sea, and did not rise.
+
+There was no maintaining an unsupported upright position on that acute
+slant of deck.  Everybody held on.  Mr. Pike frankly gripped the poop-
+rail with both hands, and Miss West and I made frantic clutches and
+scrambled for footing.  But I noticed that the Samurai, poised lightly,
+like a bird on the verge of flight, merely rested one hand on the rail.
+He gave no orders.  As I divined, there was nothing to be done.  He
+waited--that was all--in tranquillity and repose.  The situation was
+simple.  Either the masts would go, or the _Elsinore_ would rise with her
+masts intact, or she would never rise again.
+
+In the meantime she lay dead, her lee yardarms almost touching the sea,
+the sea creaming solidly to her hatch-combings across the buried, unseen
+rail.
+
+The minutes were as centuries, until the bow paid off and the _Elsinore_,
+turned tail before it, righted to an even keel.  Immediately this was
+accomplished Captain West had her brought back upon the wind.  And
+immediately, thereupon, the big foresail went adrift from its gaskets.
+The shock, or succession of shocks, to the ship, from the tremendous
+buffeting that followed, was fearful.  It seemed she was being racked to
+pieces.  Master and mate were side by side when this happened, and the
+expressions on their faces typified them.  In neither face was
+apprehension.  Mr. Pike's face bore a sour sneer for the worthless
+sailors who had botched the job.  Captain West's face was serenely
+considerative.
+
+Still, nothing was to be done, could be done; and for five minutes the
+_Elsinore_ was shaken as in the maw of some gigantic monster, until the
+last shreds of the great piece of canvas had been torn away.
+
+"Our foresail has departed for Africa," Miss West laughed in my ear.
+
+She is like her father, unaware of fear.
+
+"And now we may as well go below and be comfortable," she said five
+minutes later.  "The worst is over.  It will only be blow, blow, blow,
+and a big sea making."
+
+* * * * *
+
+All day it blew.  And the big sea that arose made the _Elsinore's_
+conduct almost unlivable.  My only comfort was achieved by taking to my
+bunk and wedging myself with pillows buttressed against the bunk's sides
+by empty soap-boxes which Wada arranged.  Mr. Pike, clinging to my door-
+casing while his legs sprawled adrift in a succession of terrific rolls,
+paused to tell me that it was a new one on him in the pampero line.  It
+was all wrong from the first.  It had not come on right.  It had no
+reason to be.
+
+He paused a little longer, and, in a casual way, that under the
+circumstances was ridiculously transparent, exposed what was at ferment
+in his mind.
+
+First of all he was absurd enough to ask if Possum showed symptoms of sea-
+sickness.  Next, he unburdened his wrath for the inefficients who had
+lost the foresail, and sympathized with the sail-makers for the extra
+work thrown upon them.  Then he asked permission to borrow one of my
+books, and, clinging to my bunk, selected Buchner's _Force and Matter_
+from my shelf, carefully wedging the empty space with the doubled
+magazine I use for that purpose.
+
+Still he was loth to depart, and, cudgelling his brains for a pretext, he
+set up a rambling discourse on River Plate weather.  And all the time I
+kept wondering what was behind it all.  At last it came.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Pathurst," he remarked, "do you happen to remember how
+many years ago Mr. Mellaire said it was that he was dismasted and
+foundered off here?"
+
+I caught his drift on the instant.
+
+"Eight years ago, wasn't it?" I lied.
+
+Mr. Pike let this sink in and slowly digested it, while the _Elsinore_
+was guilty of three huge rolls down to port and back again.
+
+"Now I wonder what ship was sunk off the Plate eight years ago?" he
+communed, as if with himself.  "I guess I'll have to ask Mr. Mellaire her
+name.  You can search me for all any I can recollect."
+
+He thanked me with unwonted elaborateness for _Force and Matter_, of
+which I knew he would never read a line, and felt his way to the door.
+Here he hung on for a moment, as if struck by a new and most accidental
+idea.
+
+"Now it wasn't, by any chance, that he said eighteen years ago?" he
+queried.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Eight years ago," I said.  "That's the way I remember it, though why I
+should remember it at all I don't know.  But that is what he said," I
+went on with increasing confidence.  "Eight years ago.  I am sure of it."
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me ponderingly, and waited until the _Elsinore_ had
+fairly righted for an instant ere he took his departure down the hall.
+
+I think I have followed the working of his mind.  I have long since
+learned that his memory of ships, officers, cargoes, gales, and disasters
+is remarkable.  He is a veritable encyclopaedia of the sea.  Also, it is
+patent that he has equipped himself with Sidney Waltham's history.  As
+yet, he does not dream that Mr. Mellaire is Sidney Waltham, and he is
+merely wondering if Mr. Mellaire was a ship-mate of Sidney Waltham
+eighteen years ago in the ship lost off the Plate.
+
+In the meantime, I shall never forgive Mr. Mellaire for this slip he has
+made.  He should have been more careful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+An abominable night!  A wonderful night!  Sleep?  I suppose I did sleep,
+in catnaps, but I swear I heard every bell struck until three-thirty.
+Then came a change, an easement.  No longer was it a stubborn, loggy
+fight against pressures.  The _Elsinore_ moved.  I could feel her slip,
+and slide, and send, and soar.  Whereas before she had been flung
+continually down to port, she now rolled as far to one side as to the
+other.
+
+I knew what had taken place.  Instead of remaining hove-to on the
+pampero, Captain West had turned tail and was running before it.  This, I
+understood, meant a really serious storm, for the north-east was the last
+direction in which Captain West desired to go.  But at any rate the
+movement, though wilder, was easier, and I slept.  I was awakened at five
+by the thunder of seas that fell aboard, rushed down the main deck, and
+crashed against the cabin wall.  Through my open door I could see water
+swashing up and down the hall, while half a foot of water creamed and
+curdled from under my bunk across the floor each time the ship rolled to
+starboard.
+
+The steward brought me my coffee, and, wedged by boxes and pillows, like
+an equilibrist, I sat up and drank it.  Luckily I managed to finish it in
+time, for a succession of terrific rolls emptied one of my book-shelves.
+Possum, crawling upward from my feet under the covered way of my bed,
+yapped with terror as the seas smashed and thundered and as the avalanche
+of books descended upon us.  And I could not but grin when the _Paste
+Board Crown_ smote me on the head, while the puppy was knocked gasping
+with Chesterton's _What's Wrong with the World_?
+
+"Well, what do you think?" I queried of the steward who was helping to
+set us and the books to rights.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his bright slant eyes were very bright as
+he replied:
+
+"Many times I see like this.  Me old man.  Many times I see more bad.  Too
+much wind, too much work.  Rotten dam bad."
+
+I could guess that the scene on deck was a spectacle, and at six o'clock,
+as gray light showed through my ports in the intervals when they were not
+submerged, I essayed the side-board of my bunk like a gymnast, captured
+my careering slippers, and shuddered as I thrust my bare feet into their
+chill sogginess.  I did not wait to dress.  Merely in pyjamas I headed
+for the poop, Possum wailing dismally at my desertion.
+
+It was a feat to travel the narrow halls.  Time and again I paused and
+held on until my finger-tips hurt.  In the moments of easement I made
+progress.  Yet I miscalculated.  The foot of the broad stairway to the
+chart-house rested on a cross-hall a dozen feet in length.
+Over-confidence and an unusually violent antic of the _Elsinore_ caused
+the disaster.  She flung down to starboard with such suddenness and at
+such a pitch that the flooring seemed to go out from under me and I
+hustled helplessly down the incline.  I missed a frantic clutch at the
+newel-post, flung up my arm in time to save my face, and, most
+fortunately, whirled half about, and, still falling, impacted with my
+shoulder muscle-pad on Captain West's door.
+
+Youth will have its way.  So will a ship in a sea.  And so will a hundred
+and seventy pounds of a man.  The beautiful hardwood door-panel
+splintered, the latch fetched away, and I broke the nails of the four
+fingers of my right hand in a futile grab at the flying door, marring the
+polished surface with four parallel scratches.  I kept right on, erupting
+into Captain West's spacious room with the big brass bed.
+
+Miss West, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown, her eyes heavy still with
+sleep, her hair glorious and for the once ungroomed, clinging in the
+doorway that gave entrance on the main cabin, met my startled gaze with
+an equally startled gaze.
+
+It was no time for apologies.  I kept right on my mad way, caught the
+foot stanchion, and was whipped around in half a circle flat upon Captain
+West's brass bed.
+
+Miss West was beginning to laugh.
+
+"Come right in," she gurgled.
+
+A score of retorts, all deliciously inadvisable, tickled my tongue, so I
+said nothing, contenting myself with holding on with my left hand while I
+nursed my stinging right hand under my arm-pit.  Beyond her, across the
+floor of the main cabin, I saw the steward in pursuit of Captain West's
+Bible and a sheaf of Miss West's music.  And as she gurgled and laughed
+at me, beholding her in this intimacy of storm, the thought flashed
+through my brain:
+
+_She is a woman_.  _She is desirable_.
+
+Now did she sense this fleeting, unuttered flash of mine?  I know not,
+save that her laughter left her, and long conventional training asserted
+itself as she said:
+
+"I just knew everything was adrift in father's room.  He hasn't been in
+it all night.  I could hear things rolling around . . . What is wrong?
+Are you hurt?"
+
+"Stubbed my fingers, that's all," I answered, looking at my broken nails
+and standing gingerly upright.
+
+"My, that _was_ a roll," she sympathized.
+
+"Yes; I'd started to go upstairs," I said, "and not to turn into your
+father's bed.  I'm afraid I've ruined the door."
+
+Came another series of great rolls.  I sat down on the bed and held on.
+Miss West, secure in the doorway, began gurgling again, while beyond,
+across the cabin carpet, the steward shot past, embracing a small writing-
+desk that had evidently carried away from its fastenings when he seized
+hold of it for support.  More seas smashed and crashed against the
+for'ard wall of the cabin; and the steward, failing of lodgment, shot
+back across the carpet, still holding the desk from harm.
+
+Taking advantage of favouring spells, I managed to effect my exit and
+gain the newel-post ere the next series of rolls came.  And as I clung on
+and waited, I could not forget what I had just seen.  Vividly under my
+eyelids burned the picture of Miss West's sleep-laden eyes, her hair, and
+all the softness of her.  _A woman and desirable_ kept drumming in my
+brain.
+
+But I forgot all this, when, nearly at the top, I was thrown up the hill
+of the stairs as if it had suddenly become downhill.  My feet flew from
+stair to stair to escape falling, and I flew, or fell, apparently upward,
+until, at the top, I hung on for dear life while the stern of the
+_Elsinore_ flung skyward on some mighty surge.
+
+Such antics of so huge a ship!  The old stereotyped "toy" describes her;
+for toy she was, the sheerest splinter of a plaything in the grip of the
+elements.  And yet, despite this overwhelming sensation of microscopic
+helplessness, I was aware of a sense of surety.  There was the Samurai.
+Informed with his will and wisdom, the _Elsinore_ was no cat's-paw.
+Everything was ordered, controlled.  She was doing what he ordained her
+to do, and, no matter what storm-Titans bellowed about her and buffeted
+her, she would continue to do what he ordained her to do.
+
+I glanced into the chart-room.  There he sat, leaned back in a
+screw-chair, his sea-booted legs, wedged against the settee, holding him
+in place in the most violent rolls.  His black oilskin coat glistened in
+the lamplight with a myriad drops of ocean that advertised a recent
+return from deck.  His sou'wester, black and glistening, was like the
+helmet of some legendary hero.  He was smoking a cigar, and he smiled and
+greeted me.  But he seemed very tired and very old--old with wisdom,
+however, not weakness.  The flesh of his face, the pink pigment quite
+washed and worn away, was more transparent than ever; and yet never was
+he more serene, never more the master absolute of our tiny, fragile
+world.  The age that showed in him was not a matter of terrestrial years.
+It was ageless, passionless, beyond human.  Never had he appeared so
+great to me, so far remote, so much a spirit visitant.
+
+And he cautioned and advised me, in silver-mellow beneficent voice, as I
+essayed the venture of opening the chart-house door to gain outside.  He
+knew the moment, although I never could have guessed it for myself, and
+gave the word that enabled me to win the poop.
+
+Water was everywhere.  The _Elsinore_ was rushing through a blurring
+whirr of water.  Seas creamed and licked the poop-deck edge, now to
+starboard, now to port.  High in the air, over-towering and perilously
+down-toppling, following-seas pursued our stern.  The air was filled with
+spindrift like a fog or spray.  No officer of the watch was in sight.  The
+poop was deserted, save for two helmsmen in streaming oilskins under the
+half-shelter of the open wheel-house.  I nodded good morning to them.
+
+One was Tom Spink, the elderly but keen and dependable English sailor.
+The other was Bill Quigley, one of a forecastle group of three that
+herded uniquely together, though the other two, Frank Fitzgibbon and
+Richard Oiler, were in the second mate's watch.  The three had proved
+handy with their fists, and clannish; they had fought pitched forecastle
+battles with the gangster clique and won a sort of neutrality of
+independence for themselves.  They were not exactly sailors--Mr. Mellaire
+sneeringly called them the "bricklayers"--but they had successfully
+refused subservience to the gangster crowd.
+
+To cross the deck from the chart-house to the break of the poop was no
+slight feat, but I managed it and hung on to the railing while the wind
+stung my flesh with the flappings of my pyjamas.  At this moment, and for
+the moment, the _Elsinore_ righted to an even keel, and dashed along and
+down the avalanching face of a wave.  And as she thus righted her deck
+was filled with water level from rail to rail.  Above this flood, or knee-
+deep in it, Mr. Pike and half-a-dozen sailors were bunched on the fife-
+rail of the mizzen-mast.  The carpenter, too, was there, with a couple of
+assistants.
+
+The next roll spilled half a thousand tons of water outboard sheer over
+the starboard-rail, while all the starboard ports opened automatically
+and gushed huge streams.  Then came the opposite roll to port, with a
+clanging shut of the iron doors; and a hundred tons of sea sloshed
+outboard across the port-rail, while all the iron doors on that side
+opened wide and gushed.  And all this time, it must not be forgotten, the
+_Elsinore_ was dashing ahead through the sea.
+
+The only sail she carried was three upper-topsails.  Not the tiniest
+triangle of headsail was on her.  I had never seen her with so little
+wind-surface, and the three narrow strips of canvas, bellied to the
+seemingness of sheet-iron with the pressure of the wind, drove her before
+the gale at astonishing speed.
+
+As the water on the deck subsided the men on the fife-rail left their
+refuge.  One group, led by the redoubtable Mr. Pike, strove to capture a
+mass of planks and twisted steel.  For the moment I did not recognize
+what it was.  The carpenter, with two men, sprang upon Number Three hatch
+and worked hurriedly and fearfully.  And I knew why Captain West had
+turned tail to the storm.  Number Three hatch was a wreck.  Among other
+things the great timber, called the "strong-back," was broken.  He had
+had to run, or founder.  Before our decks were swept again I could make
+out the carpenter's emergency repairs.  With fresh timbers he was
+bolting, lashing, and wedging Number Three hatch into some sort of
+tightness.
+
+When the _Elsinore_ dipped her port-rail under and scooped several
+hundred tons of South Atlantic, and then, immediately rolling her
+starboard-rail under, had another hundred tons of breaking sea fall in
+board upon her, all the men forsook everything and scrambled for life
+upon the fife-rail.  In the bursting spray they were quite hidden; and
+then I saw them and counted them all as they emerged into view.  Again
+they waited for the water to subside.
+
+The mass of wreckage pursued by Mr. Pike and his men ground a hundred
+feet along the deck for'ard, and, as the _Elsinore's_ stern sank down in
+some abyss, ground back again and smashed up against the cabin wall.  I
+identified this stuff as part of the bridge.  That portion which spanned
+from the mizzen-mast to the 'midship-house was missing, while the
+starboard boat on the 'midship-house was a splintered mess.
+
+Watching the struggle to capture and subdue the section of bridge, I was
+reminded of Victor Hugo's splendid description of the sailor's battle
+with a ship's gun gone adrift in a night of storm.  But there was a
+difference, I found that Hugo's narrative had stirred me more profoundly
+than was I stirred by this actual struggle before my eyes.
+
+I have repeatedly said that the sea makes one hard.  I now realized how
+hard I had become as I stood there at the break of the poop in my wind-
+shipped, spray-soaked pyjamas.  I felt no solicitude for the forecastle
+humans who struggled in peril of their lives beneath me.  They did not
+count.  Ah--I was even curious to see what might happen, did they get
+caught by those crashing avalanches of sea ere they could gain the safety
+of the fife-rail.
+
+And I saw.  Mr. Pike, in the lead, of course, up to his waist in rushing
+water, dashed in, caught the flying wreckage with a turn of rope, and
+fetched it up short with a turn around one of the port mizzen-shrouds.
+The _Elsinore_ flung down to port, and a solid wall of down-toppling
+green upreared a dozen feet above the rail.  The men fled to the fife-
+rail.  But Mr. Pike, holding his turn, held on, looked squarely into the
+wall of the wave, and received the downfall.  He emerged, still holding
+by the turn the captured bridge.
+
+The feeble-minded faun (the stone-deaf man) led the way to Mr. Pike's
+assistance, followed by Tony, the suicidal Greek.  Paddy was next, and in
+order came Shorty, Henry the training-ship boy, and Nancy, last, of
+course, and looking as if he were going to execution.
+
+The deck-water was no more than knee-deep, though rushing with torrential
+force, when Mr. Pike and the six men lifted the section of bridge and
+started for'ard with it.  They swayed and staggered, but managed to keep
+going.
+
+The carpenter saw the impending ocean-mountain first.  I saw him cry to
+his own men and then to Mr. Pike ere he fled to the fife-rail.  But Mr.
+Pike's men had no chance.  Abreast of the 'midship-house, on the
+starboard side, fully fifteen feet above the rail and twenty above the
+deck, the sea fell on board.  The top of the 'midship-house was swept
+clean of the splintered boat.  The water, impacting against the side of
+the house, spouted skyward as high as the crojack-yard.  And all this, in
+addition to the main bulk of the wave, swept and descended upon Mr. Pike
+and his men.
+
+They disappeared.  The bridge disappeared.  The _Elsinore_ rolled to port
+and dipped her deck full from rail to rail.  Next, she plunged down by
+the head, and all this mass of water surged forward.  Through the
+creaming, foaming surface now and then emerged an arm, or a head, or a
+back, while cruel edges of jagged plank and twisted steel rods advertised
+that the bridge was turning over and over.  I wondered what men were
+beneath it and what mauling they were receiving.
+
+And yet these men did not count.  I was aware of anxiety only for Mr.
+Pike.  He, in a way, socially, was of my caste and class.  He and I
+belonged aft in the high place; ate at the same table.  I was acutely
+desirous that he should not be hurt or killed.  The rest did not matter.
+They were not of my world.  I imagine the old-time skippers, on the
+middle passage, felt much the same toward their slave-cargoes in the
+fetid 'tween decks.
+
+The _Elsinore's_ bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming
+valley.  Not a man had gained his feet.  Bridge and men swept back toward
+me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds.  And then that prodigious,
+incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright,
+dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and
+the Faun.  My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer
+and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of
+danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a
+half-drowned slave in either hand.
+
+I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue,
+like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with
+him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command.  I
+nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled
+and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain.  As for the rest--the
+weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the
+half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered
+races--how could they count?  My heels were iron as I gazed on them in
+their peril and weakness.  Lord!  Lord!  For ten thousand generations and
+centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil
+of our will.
+
+Again the _Elsinore_ rolled to starboard and to port, while the spume
+spouted to our lower-yards and a thousand tons of South Atlantic surged
+across from rail to rail.  And again all were down and under, with jagged
+plank and twisted steel overriding them.  And again that amazing blond-
+skinned giant emerged, on his two legs upstanding, a broken waif like a
+rat in either hand.  He forced his way through rushing, waist-high water,
+deposited his burdens with the carpenter on the fife-rail, and returned
+to drag Larry reeling to his feet and help him to the fife-rail.  Out of
+the wash, Tony, the Greek, crawled on hands and knees and sank down
+helplessly at the fife-rail.  There was nothing suicidal now in his mood.
+Struggle as he would, he could not lift himself until the mate, gripping
+his oilskin at the collar, with one hand flung him through the air into
+the carpenter's arms.
+
+Next came Shorty, his face streaming blood, one arm hanging useless, his
+sea-boots stripped from him.  Mr. Pike pitched him into the fife-rail,
+and returned for the last man.  It was Henry, the training-ship boy.  Him
+I had seen, unstruggling, motionless, show at the surface like a drowned
+man and sink again as the flood surged aft and smashed him against the
+cabin.  Mr. Pike, shoulder-deep, twice beaten to his knees and under by
+bursting seas, caught the lad, shouldered him, and carried him away
+for'ard.
+
+An hour later, in the cabin, I encountered Mr. Pike going into breakfast.
+He had changed his clothes, and he had shaved!  Now how could one treat a
+hero such as he save as I treated him when I remarked off-handedly that
+he must have had a lively watch?
+
+"My," he answered, equally off-handedly, "I did get a prime soaking."
+
+That was all.  He had had no time to see me at the poop-rail.  It was
+merely the day's work, the ship's work, the MAN'S work--all capitals, if
+you please, in MAN.  I was the only one aft who knew, and I knew because
+I had chanced to see.  Had I not been on the poop at that early hour no
+one aft ever would have known those gray, storm-morning deeds of his.
+
+"Anybody hurt?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, some of the men got wet.  But no bones broke.  Henry'll be laid off
+for a day.  He got turned over in a sea and bashed his head.  And
+Shorty's got a wrenched shoulder, I think.--But, say, we got Davis into
+the top bunk!  The seas filled him full and he had to climb for it.  He's
+all awash and wet now, and you oughta seen me praying for more."  He
+paused and sighed.  "I'm getting old, I guess.  I oughta wring his neck,
+but somehow I ain't got the gumption.  Just the same, he'll be overside
+before we get in."
+
+"A month's wages against a pound of tobacco he won't," I challenged.
+
+"No," said Mr. Pike slowly.  "But I'll tell you what I will do.  I'll bet
+you a pound of tobacco even, or a month's wages even, that I'll have the
+pleasure of putting a sack of coal to his feet that never will come off."
+
+"Done," said I.
+
+"Done," said Mr. Pike.  "And now I guess I'll get a bite to eat."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+The more I see of Miss West the more she pleases me.  Explain it in terms
+of propinquity, or isolation, or whatever you will; I, at least, do not
+attempt explanation.  I know only that she is a woman and desirable.  And
+I am rather proud, in a way, to find that I am just a man like any man.
+The midnight oil, and the relentless pursuit I have endured in the past
+from the whole tribe of women, have not, I am glad to say, utterly
+spoiled me.
+
+I am obsessed by that phrase--a _woman and desirable_.  It beats in my
+brain, in my thought.  I go out of my way to steal a glimpse of Miss West
+through a cabin door or vista of hall when she does not know I am
+looking.  A woman is a wonderful thing.  A woman's hair is wonderful.  A
+woman's softness is a magic.--Oh, I know them for what they are, and yet
+this very knowledge makes them only the more wonderful.  I know--I would
+stake my soul--that Miss West has considered me as a mate a thousand
+times to once that I have so considered her.  And yet--she is a woman and
+desirable.
+
+And I find myself continually reminded of Richard Le Gallienne's
+inimitable quatrain:
+
+   "Were I a woman, I would all day long
+   Sing my own beauty in some holy song,
+   Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid,
+   And say 'I am a woman' all day long."
+
+Let me advise all philosophers suffering from world-sickness to take a
+long sea voyage with a woman like Miss West.
+
+In this narrative I shall call her "Miss West" no more.  She has ceased
+to be Miss West.  She is Margaret.  I do not think of her as Miss West.  I
+think of her as Margaret.  It is a pretty word, a woman-word.  What poet
+must have created it!  Margaret!  I never tire of it.  My tongue is
+enamoured of it.  Margaret West!  What a name to conjure with!  A name
+provocative of dreams and mighty connotations.  The history of our
+westward-faring race is written in it.  There is pride in it, and
+dominion, and adventure, and conquest.  When I murmur it I see visions of
+lean, beaked ships, of winged helmets, and heels iron-shod of restless
+men, royal lovers, royal adventurers, royal fighters.  Yes, and even now,
+in these latter days when the sun consumes us, still we sit in the high
+seat of government and command.
+
+Oh--and by the way--she is twenty-four years old.  I asked Mr. Pike the
+date of the _Dixie's_ collision with the river steamer in San Francisco
+Bay.  This occurred in 1901.  Margaret was twelve years old at the time.
+This is 1913.  Blessings on the head of the man who invented arithmetic!
+She is twenty-four.  Her name is Margaret, and she is desirable.
+
+* * * * *
+
+There are so many things to tell about.  Where and how this mad voyage,
+with a mad crew, will end is beyond all surmise.  But the _Elsinore_
+drives on, and day by day her history is bloodily written.  And while
+murder is done, and while the whole floating drama moves toward the bleak
+southern ocean and the icy blasts of Cape Horn, I sit in the high place
+with the masters, unafraid, I am proud to say, in an ecstasy, I am proud
+to say, and I murmur over and over to _myself_--_Margaret_, _a woman_;
+_Margaret_, _and desirable_.
+
+But to resume.  It is the first day of June.  Ten days have passed since
+the pampero.  When the strong back on Number Three hatch was repaired
+Captain West came back on the wind, hove to, and rode out the gale.  Since
+then, in calm, and fog, and damp, and storm, we have won south until to-
+day we are almost abreast of the Falklands.  The coast of the Argentine
+lies to the West, below the sea-line, and some time this morning we
+crossed the fiftieth parallel of south latitude.  Here begins the passage
+of Cape Horn, for so it is reckoned by the navigators--fifty south in the
+Atlantic to fifty south in the Pacific.
+
+And yet all is well with us in the matter of weather.  The _Elsinore_
+slides along with favouring winds.  Daily it grows colder.  The great
+cabin stove roars and is white-hot, and all the connecting doors are
+open, so that the whole after region of the ship is warm and comfortable.
+But on the deck the air bites, and Margaret and I wear mittens as we
+promenade the poop or go for'ard along the repaired bridge to see the
+chickens on the 'midship-house.  The poor, wretched creatures of instinct
+and climate!  Behold, as they approach the southern mid-winter of the
+Horn, when they have need of all their feathers, they proceed to moult,
+because, forsooth, this is the summer time in the land they came from.  Or
+is moulting determined by the time of year they happen to be born?  I
+shall have to look into this.  Margaret will know.
+
+Yesterday ominous preparations were made for the passage of the Horn.  All
+the braces were taken from the main deck pin-rails and geared and
+arranged so that they may be worked from the tops of the houses.
+
+Thus, the fore-braces run to the top of the forecastle, the main-braces
+to the top of the 'midship-house, and the mizzen-braces to the poop.  It
+is evident that they expect our main deck frequently to be filled with
+water.  So evident is it that a laden ship when in big seas is like a log
+awash, that fore and aft, on both sides, along the deck, shoulder-high,
+life-lines have been rigged.  Also, the two iron doors, on port and
+starboard, that open from the cabin directly upon the main deck, have
+been barricaded and caulked.  Not until we are in the Pacific and flying
+north will these doors open again.
+
+And while we prepare to battle around the stormiest headland in the world
+our situation on board grows darker.  This morning Petro Marinkovich, a
+sailor in Mr. Mellaire's watch, was found dead on Number One hatch.  The
+body bore several knife-wounds and the throat was cut.  It was palpably
+done by some one or several of the forecastle hands; but not a word can
+be elicited.  Those who are guilty of it are silent, of course; while
+others who may chance to know are afraid to speak.
+
+Before midday the body was overside with the customary sack of coal.
+Already the man is a past episode.  But the humans for'ard are tense with
+expectancy of what is to come.  I strolled for'ard this afternoon, and
+noted for the first time a distinct hostility toward me.  They recognize
+that I belong with the after-guard in the high place.  Oh, nothing was
+said; but it was patent by the way almost every man looked at me, or
+refused to look at me.  Only Mulligan Jacobs and Charles Davis were
+outspoken.
+
+"Good riddance," said Mulligan Jacobs.  "The Guinea didn't have the spunk
+of a louse.  And he's better off, ain't he?  He lived dirty, an' he died
+dirty, an' now he's over an' done with the whole dirty game.  There's men
+on board that oughta wish they was as lucky as him.  Theirs is still a-
+coming to 'em."
+
+"You mean . . . ?" I queried.
+
+"Whatever you want to think I mean," the twisted wretch grinned
+malevolently into my face.
+
+Charles Davis, when I peeped into his iron room, was exuberant.
+
+"A pretty tale for the court in Seattle," he exulted.  "It'll only make
+my case that much stronger.  And wait till the reporters get hold of it!
+The hell-ship _Elsinore_!  They'll have pretty pickin's!"
+
+"I haven't seen any hell-ship," I said coldly.
+
+"You've seen my treatment, ain't you?" he retorted.  "You've seen the
+hell I've got, ain't you?"
+
+"I know you for a cold-blooded murderer," I answered.
+
+"The court will determine that, sir.  All you'll have to do is to testify
+to facts."
+
+"I'll testify that had I been in the mate's place I'd have hanged you for
+murder."
+
+His eyes positively sparkled.
+
+"I'll ask you to remember this conversation when you're under oath, sir,"
+he cried eagerly.
+
+I confess the man aroused in me a reluctant admiration.  I looked about
+his mean, iron-walled room.  During the pampero the place had been awash.
+The white paint was peeling off in huge scabs, and iron-rust was
+everywhere.  The floor was filthy.  The place stank with the stench of
+his sickness.  His pannikin and unwashed eating-gear from the last meal
+were scattered on the floor: His blankets were wet, his clothing was wet.
+In a corner was a heterogeneous mass of soggy, dirty garments.  He lay in
+the very bunk in which he had brained O'Sullivan.  He had been months in
+this vile hole.  In order to live he would have to remain months more in
+it.  And while his rat-like vitality won my admiration, I loathed and
+detested him in very nausea.
+
+"Aren't you afraid?" I demanded.  "What makes you think you will last the
+voyage?  Don't you know bets are being made that you won't?"
+
+So interested was he that he seemed to prick up his ears as he raised on
+his elbow.
+
+"I suppose you're too scared to tell me about them bets," he sneered.
+
+"Oh, I've bet you'll last," I assured him.
+
+"That means there's others that bet I won't," he rattled on hastily.  "An'
+that means that there's men aboard the _Elsinore_ right now financially
+interested in my taking-off."
+
+At this moment the steward, bound aft from the galley, paused in the
+doorway and listened, grinning.  As for Charles Davis, the man had missed
+his vocation.  He should have been a land-lawyer, not a sea-lawyer.
+
+"Very well, sir," he went on.  "I'll have you testify to that in Seattle,
+unless you're lying to a helpless sick man, or unless you'll perjure
+yourself under oath."
+
+He got what he was seeking, for he stung me to retort:
+
+"Oh, I'll testify.  Though I tell you candidly that I don't think I'll
+win my bet."
+
+"You loose 'm bet sure," the steward broke in, nodding his head.  "That
+fellow him die damn soon."
+
+"Bet with'm, sir," David challenged me.  "It's a straight tip from me,
+an' a regular cinch."
+
+The whole situation was so gruesome and grotesque, and I had been swept
+into it so absurdly, that for the moment I did not know what to do or
+say.
+
+"It's good money," Davis urged.  "I ain't goin' to die.  Look here,
+steward, how much you want to bet?"
+
+"Five dollar, ten dollar, twenty dollar," the steward answered, with a
+shoulder-shrug that meant that the sum was immaterial.
+
+"Very well then, steward.  Mr. Pathurst covers your money, say for
+twenty.  Is it a go, sir?"
+
+"Why don't you bet with him yourself?" I demanded.
+
+"Sure I will, sir.  Here, you steward, I bet you twenty even I don't
+die."
+
+The steward shook his head.
+
+"I bet you twenty to ten," the sick man insisted.  "What's eatin' you,
+anyway?"
+
+"You live, me lose, me pay you," the steward explained.  "You die, I win,
+you dead; no pay me."
+
+Still grinning and shaking his head, he went his way.
+
+"Just the same, sir, it'll be rich testimony," David chuckled.  "An'
+can't you see the reporters eatin' it up?"
+
+The Asiatic clique in the cook's room has its suspicions about the death
+of Marinkovich, but will not voice them.  Beyond shakings of heads and
+dark mutterings, I can get nothing out of Wada or the steward.  When I
+talked with the sail-maker, he complained that his injured hand was
+hurting him and that he would be glad when he could get to the surgeons
+in Seattle.  As for the murder, when pressed by me, he gave me to
+understand that it was no affair of the Japanese or Chinese on board, and
+that he was a Japanese.
+
+But Louis, the Chinese half-caste with the Oxford accent, was more frank.
+I caught him aft from the galley on a trip to the lazarette for
+provisions.
+
+"We are of a different race, sir, from these men," he said; "and our
+safest policy is to leave them alone.  We have talked it over, and we
+have nothing to say, sir, nothing whatever to say.  Consider my position.
+I work for'ard in the galley; I am in constant contact with the sailors;
+I even sleep in their section of the ship; and I am one man against many.
+The only other countryman I have on board is the steward, and he sleeps
+aft.  Your servant and the two sail-makers are Japanese.  They are only
+remotely kin to us, though we've agreed to stand together and apart from
+whatever happens."
+
+"There is Shorty," I said, remembering Mr. Pike's diagnosis of his mixed
+nationality.
+
+"But we do not recognize him, sir," Louis answered suavely.  "He is
+Portuguese; he is Malay; he is Japanese, true; but he is a mongrel, sir,
+a mongrel and a bastard.  Also, he is a fool.  And please, sir, remember
+that we are very few, and that our position compels us to neutrality."
+
+"But your outlook is gloomy," I persisted.  "How do you think it will
+end?"
+
+"We shall arrive in Seattle most probably, some of us.  But I can tell
+you this, sir: I have lived a long life on the sea, but I have never seen
+a crew like this.  There are few sailors in it; there are bad men in it;
+and the rest are fools and worse.  You will notice I mention no names,
+sir; but there are men on board whom I do not care to antagonize.  I am
+just Louis, the cook.  I do my work to the best of my ability, and that
+is all, sir."
+
+"And will Charles Davis arrive in Seattle?" I asked, changing the topic
+in acknowledgment of his right to be reticent.
+
+"No, I do not think so, sir," he answered, although his eyes thanked me
+for my courtesy.  "The steward tells me you have bet that he will.  I
+think, sir, it is a poor bet.  We are about to go around the Horn.  I
+have been around it many times.  This is midwinter, and we are going from
+east to west.  Davis' room will be awash for weeks.  It will never be
+dry.  A strong healthy man confined in it could well die of the hardship.
+And Davis is far from well.  In short, sir, I know his condition, and he
+is in a shocking state.  Surgeons might prolong his life, but here in a
+wind-jammer it is shortened very rapidly.  I have seen many men die at
+sea.  I know, sir.  Thank you, sir."
+
+And the Eurasian Chinese-Englishman bowed himself away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Things are worse than I fancied.  Here are two episodes within the last
+seventy-two hours.  Mr. Mellaire, for instance, is going to pieces.  He
+cannot stand the strain of being on the same vessel with the man who has
+sworn to avenge Captain Somers's murder, especially when that man is the
+redoubtable Mr. Pike.
+
+For several days Margaret and I have been remarking the second mate's
+bloodshot eyes and pain-lined face and wondering if he were sick.  And to-
+day the secret leaked out.  Wada does not like Mr. Mellaire, and this
+morning, when he brought me breakfast, I saw by the wicked, gleeful gleam
+in his almond eyes that he was spilling over with some fresh, delectable
+ship's gossip.
+
+For several days, I learned, he and the steward have been solving a cabin
+mystery.  A gallon can of wood alcohol, standing on a shelf in the after-
+room, had lost quite a portion of its contents.  They compared notes and
+then made of themselves a Sherlock Holmes and a Doctor Watson.  First,
+they gauged the daily diminution of alcohol.  Next they gauged it several
+times daily, and learned that the diminution, whenever it occurred, was
+first apparent immediately after meal-time.  This focussed their
+attention on two suspects--the second mate and the carpenter, who alone
+sat in the after-room.  The rest was easy.  Whenever Mr. Mellaire arrived
+ahead of the carpenter more alcohol was missing.  When they arrived and
+departed together, the alcohol was undisturbed.  The carpenter was never
+alone in the room.  The syllogism was complete.  And now the steward
+stores the alcohol under his bunk.
+
+But wood alcohol is deadly poison.  What a constitution this man of fifty
+must have!  Small wonder his eyes have been bloodshot.  The great wonder
+is that the stuff did not destroy him.
+
+I have not whispered a word of this to Margaret; nor shall I whisper it.
+I should like to put Mr. Pike on his guard; and yet I know that the
+revealing of Mr. Mellaire's identity would precipitate another killing.
+And still we drive south, close-hauled on the wind, toward the
+inhospitable tip of the continent.  To-day we are south of a line drawn
+between the Straits of Magellan and the Falklands, and to-morrow, if the
+breeze holds, we shall pick up the coast of Tierra del Fuego close to the
+entrance of the Straits of Le Maire, through which Captain West intends
+to pass if the wind favours.
+
+The other episode occurred last night.  Mr. Pike says nothing, yet he
+knows the crew situation.  I have been watching some time now, ever since
+the death of Marinkovich; and I am certain that Mr. Pike never ventures
+on the main deck after dark.  Yet he holds his tongue, confides in no
+man, and plays out the bitter perilous game as a commonplace matter of
+course and all in the day's work.
+
+And now to the episode.  Shortly after the close of the second dog-watch
+last evening I went for'ard to the chickens on the 'midship-house on an
+errand for Margaret.  I was to make sure that the steward had carried out
+her orders.  The canvas covering to the big chicken coop had to be down,
+the ventilation insured, and the kerosene stove burning properly.  When I
+had proved to my satisfaction the dependableness of the steward, and just
+as I was on the verge of returning to the poop, I was drawn aside by the
+weird crying of penguins in the darkness and by the unmistakable noise of
+a whale blowing not far away.
+
+I had climbed around the end of the port boat, and was standing there,
+quite hidden in the darkness, when I heard the unmistakable age-lag step
+of the mate proceed along the bridge from the poop.  It was a dim starry
+night, and the _Elsinore_, in the calm ocean under the lee of Tierra del
+Fuego, was slipping gently and prettily through the water at an eight-
+knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike paused at the for'ard end of the housetop and stood in a
+listening attitude.  From the main deck below, near Number Two hatch,
+across the mumbling of various voices, I could recognize Kid Twist, Nosey
+Murphy, and Bert Rhine--the three gangsters.  But Steve Roberts, the cow-
+boy, was also there, as was Mr. Mellaire, both of whom belonged in the
+other watch and should have been turned in; for, at midnight, it would be
+their watch on deck.  Especially wrong was Mr. Mellaire's presence,
+holding social converse with members of the crew--a breach of ship ethics
+most grievous.
+
+I have always been cursed with curiosity.  Always have I wanted to know;
+and, on the _Elsinore_, I have already witnessed many a little scene that
+was a clean-cut dramatic gem.  So I did not discover myself, but lurked
+behind the boat.
+
+Five minutes passed.  Ten minutes passed.  The men still talked.  I was
+tantalized by the crying of the penguins, and by the whale, evidently
+playful, which came so close that it spouted and splashed a biscuit-toss
+away.  I saw Mr. Pike's head turn at the sound; he glanced squarely in my
+direction, but did not see me.  Then he returned to listening to the
+mumble of voices from beneath.
+
+Now whether Mulligan Jacobs just happened along, or whether he was
+deliberately scouting, I do not know.  I tell what occurred.  Up-and-down
+the side of the 'midship-house is a ladder.  And up this ladder Mulligan
+Jacobs climbed so noiselessly that I was not aware of his presence until
+I heard Mr. Pike snarl:
+
+"What the hell you doin' here?"
+
+Then I saw Mulligan Jacobs in the gloom, within two yards of the mate.
+
+"What's it to you?" Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.  The voices below
+hushed.  I knew every man stood there tense and listening.  No; the
+philosophers have not yet explained Mulligan Jacobs.  There is something
+more to him than the last word has said in any book.  He stood there in
+the darkness, a fragile creature with curvature of the spine, facing
+alone the first mate, and he was not afraid.
+
+Mr. Pike cursed him with fearful, unrepeatable words, and again demanded
+what he was doing there.
+
+"I left me plug of tobacco here when I was coiling down last," said the
+little twisted man--no; he did not say it.  He spat it out like so much
+venom.
+
+"Get off of here, or I'll throw you off, you and your tobacco," raged the
+mate.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs lurched closer to Mr. Pike, and in the gloom and with the
+roll of the ship swayed in the other's face.
+
+"By God, Jacobs!" was all the mate could say.
+
+"You old stiff," was all the terrible little cripple could retort.
+
+Mr. Pike gripped him by the collar and swung him in the air.
+
+"Are you goin' down?--or am I goin' to throw you down?" the mate
+demanded.
+
+I cannot describe their manner of utterance.  It was that of wild beasts.
+
+"I ain't ate outa your hand yet, have I?" was the reply.
+
+Mr. Pike tried to say something, still holding the cripple suspended, but
+he could do no more than strangle in his impotence of rage.
+
+"You're an old stiff, an old stiff, an old stiff," Mulligan Jacobs
+chanted, equally incoherent and unimaginative with brutish fury.
+
+"Say it again and over you go," the mate managed to enunciate thickly.
+
+"You're an old stiff," gasped Mulligan Jacobs.  He was flung.  He soared
+through the air with the might of the fling, and even as he soared and
+fell through the darkness he reiterated:
+
+"Old stiff!  Old stiff!"
+
+He fell among the men on Number Two hatch, and there were confusion and
+movement below, and groans.
+
+Mr. Pike paced up and down the narrow house and gritted his teeth.  Then
+he paused.  He leaned his arms on the bridge-rail, rested his head on his
+arms for a full minute, then groaned:
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."  That was all.  Then he went aft,
+slowly, dragging his feet along the bridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+The days grow gray.  The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at
+meridian, it is lower in the northern sky.  All the old stars have long
+since gone, and it would seem the sun is following them.  The world--the
+only world I know--has been left behind far there to the north, and the
+hill of the earth is between it and us.  This sad and solitary ocean,
+gray and cold, is the end of all things, the falling-off place where all
+things cease.  Only it grows colder, and grayer, and penguins cry in the
+night, and huge amphibians moan and slubber, and great albatrosses, gray
+with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel and veer.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Land ho!" was the cry yesterday morning.  I shivered as I gazed at this,
+the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago.  There was no sun,
+and the morning was damp and cold with a brisk wind that penetrated any
+garment.  The deck thermometer marked 30--two degrees below
+freezing-point; and now and then easy squalls of snow swept past.
+
+All of the land that was to be seen was snow.  Long, low chains of peaks,
+snow-covered, arose out of the ocean.  As we drew closer, there were no
+signs of life.  It was a sheer, savage, bleak, forsaken land.  By eleven,
+off the entrance of Le Maire Straits, the squalls ceased, the wind
+steadied, and the tide began to make through in the direction we desired
+to go.
+
+Captain West did not hesitate.  His orders to Mr. Pike were quick and
+tranquil.  The man at the wheel altered the course, while both watches
+sprang aloft to shake out royals and skysails.  And yet Captain West knew
+every inch of the risk he took in this graveyard of ships.
+
+When we entered the narrow strait, under full sail and gripped by a
+tremendous tide, the rugged headlands of Tierra del Fuego dashed by with
+dizzying swiftness.  Close we were to them, and close we were to the
+jagged coast of Staten Island on the opposite shore.  It was here, in a
+wild bight, between two black and precipitous walls of rock where even
+the snow could find no lodgment, that Captain West paused in a casual
+sweep of his glasses and gazed steadily at one place.  I picked the spot
+up with my own glasses and was aware of an instant chill as I saw the
+four masts of a great ship sticking out of the water.  Whatever craft it
+was, it was as large as the _Elsinore_, and it had been but recently
+wrecked.
+
+"One of the German nitrate ships," said Mr. Pike.  Captain West nodded,
+still studying the wreck, then said:
+
+"She looks quite deserted.  Just the same, Mr. Pike, send several of your
+best-sighted sailors aloft, and keep a good lookout yourself.  There may
+be some survivors ashore trying to signal us."
+
+But we sailed on, and no signals were seen.  Mr. Pike was delighted with
+our good fortune.  He was guilty of walking up and down, rubbing his
+hands and chuckling to himself.  Not since 1888, he told me, had he been
+through the Straits of Le Maire.  Also, he said that he knew of
+shipmasters who had made forty voyages around the Horn and had never once
+had the luck to win through the straits.  The regular passage is far to
+the east around Staten Island, which means a loss of westing, and here,
+at the tip of the world, where the great west wind, unobstructed by any
+land, sweeps round and around the narrow girth of earth, westing is the
+thing that has to be fought for mile by mile and inch by inch.  The
+Sailing Directions advise masters on the Horn passage: _Make Westing_.
+_Whatever you do_, _make westing_.
+
+When we emerged from the straits in the early afternoon the same steady
+breeze continued, and in the calm water under the lee of Tierra del
+Fuego, which extends south-westerly to the Horn, we slipped along at an
+eight-knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike was beside himself.  He could scarcely tear himself from the
+deck when it was his watch below.  He chuckled, rubbed his hands, and
+incessantly hummed snatches from the Twelfth Mass.  Also, he was voluble.
+
+"To-morrow morning we'll be up with the Horn.  We'll shave it by a dozen
+or fifteen miles.  Think of it!  We'll just steal around!  I never had
+such luck, and never expected to.  Old girl _Elsinore_, you're rotten
+for'ard, but the hand of God is at your helm."
+
+Once, under the weather cloth, I came upon him talking to himself.  It
+was more a prayer.
+
+"If only she don't pipe up," he kept repeating.  "If only she don't pipe
+up."
+
+Mr. Mellaire was quite different.
+
+"It never happens," he told me.  "No ship ever went around like this.  You
+watch her come.  She always comes a-smoking out of the sou'west."
+
+"But can't a vessel ever steal around?" I asked.
+
+"The odds are mighty big against it, sir," he answered.  "I'll give you a
+line on them.  I'll wager even, sir, just a nominal bet of a pound of
+tobacco, that inside twenty-four hours we'll he hove to under
+upper-topsails.  I'll wager ten pounds to five that we're not west of the
+Horn a week from now; and, fifty to fifty being the passage, twenty
+pounds to five that two weeks from now we're not up with fifty in the
+Pacific."
+
+As for Captain West, the perils of Le Maire behind, he sat below, his
+slippered feet stretched before him, smoking a cigar.  He had nothing to
+say whatever, although Margaret and I were jubilant and dared duets
+through all of the second dog-watch.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And this morning, in a smooth sea and gentle breeze, the Horn bore almost
+due north of us not more than six miles away.  Here we were, well abreast
+and reeling off westing.
+
+"What price tobacco this morning?" I quizzed Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"Going up," he came back.  "Wish I had a thousand bets like the one with
+you, sir."
+
+I glanced about at sea and sky and gauged the speed of our way by the
+foam, but failed to see anything that warranted his remark.  It was
+surely fine weather, and the steward, in token of the same, was trying to
+catch fluttering Cape pigeons with a bent pin on a piece of thread.
+
+For'ard, on the poop, I encountered Mr. Pike.  It _was_ an encounter, for
+his salutation was a grunt.
+
+"Well, we're going right along," I ventured cheerily.
+
+He made no reply, but turned and stared into the gray south-west with an
+expression sourer than any I had ever seen on his face.  He mumbled
+something I failed to catch, and, on my asking him to repeat it, he said:
+
+"It's breeding weather.  Can't you see it?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"What d'ye think we're taking off the kites for?" he growled.
+
+I looked aloft.  The skysails were already furled; men were furling the
+royals; and the topgallant-yards were running down while clewlines and
+buntlines bagged the canvas.  Yet, if anything, our northerly breeze
+fanned even more gently.
+
+"Bless me if I can see any weather," I said.
+
+"Then go and take a look at the barometer," he grunted, as he turned on
+his heel and swung away from me.
+
+In the chart-room was Captain West, pulling on his long sea-boots.  That
+would have told me had there been no barometer, though the barometer was
+eloquent enough of itself.  The night before it had stood at 30.10.  It
+was now 28.64.  Even in the pampero it had not been so low as that.
+
+"The usual Cape Horn programme," Captain West smiled to me, as he stood
+up in all his lean and slender gracefulness and reached for his long
+oilskin coat.
+
+Still I could scarcely believe.
+
+"Is it very far away?" I inquired.
+
+He shook his head, and forebore in the act of speaking to lift his hand
+for me to listen.  The _Elsinore_ rolled uneasily, and from without came
+the soft and hollow thunder of sails emptying themselves against the
+masts and gear.
+
+We had chatted a bare five minutes, when again he lifted his head.  This
+time the _Elsinore_ heeled over slightly and remained heeled over, while
+the sighing whistle of a rising breeze awoke in the rigging.
+
+"It's beginning to make," he said, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of the
+sea.
+
+And then I heard Mr. Pike snarling out orders, and in my heart discovered
+a growing respect for Cape Horn--Cape Stiff, as the sailors call it.
+
+An hour later we were hove to on the port tack under upper-topsails and
+foresail.  The wind had come out of the south-west, and our leeway was
+setting us down upon the land.  Captain West gave orders to the mate to
+stand by to wear ship.  Both watches had been taking in sail, so that
+both watches were on deck for the manoeuvre.
+
+It was astounding, the big sea that had arisen in so short a time.  The
+wind was blowing a gale that ever, in recurring gusts, increased upon
+itself.  Nothing was visible a hundred yards away.  The day had become
+black-gray.  In the cabin lamps were burning.  The view from the poop,
+along the length of the great labouring ship, was magnificent.  Seas
+burst and surged across her weather-rail and kept her deck half filled,
+despite the spouting ports and gushing scuppers.
+
+On each of the two houses and on the poop the ship's complement, all in
+oilskins, was in groups.  For'ard, Mr. Mellaire had charge.  Mr. Pike
+took charge of the 'midship-house and the poop.  Captain West strolled up
+and down, saw everything, said nothing; for it was the mate's affair.
+
+When Mr. Pike ordered the wheel hard up, he slacked off all the mizzen-
+yards, and followed it with a partial slacking of the main-yards, so that
+the after-pressures were eased.  The foresail and fore-lower- and-upper-
+topsails remained flat in order to pay the head off before the wind.  All
+this took time.  The men were slow, not strong, and without snap.  They
+reminded me of dull oxen by the way they moved and pulled.  And the gale,
+ever snorting harder, now snorted diabolically.  Only at intervals could
+I glimpse the group on top the for'ard-house.  Again and again, leaning
+to it and holding their heads down, the men on the 'midship-house were
+obliterated by the drive of crested seas that burst against the rail,
+spouted to the lower-yards, and swept in horizontal volumes across to
+leeward.  And Mr. Pike, like an enormous spider in a wind-tossed web,
+went back and forth along the slender bridge that was itself a shaken
+thread in the blast of the storm.
+
+So tremendous were the gusts that for the time the _Elsinore_ refused to
+answer.  She lay down to it; she was swept and racked by it; but her head
+did not pay off before it, and all the while we drove down upon that
+bitter, iron coast.  And the world was black-gray, and violent, and very
+cold, with the flying spray freezing to ice in every lodgment.
+
+We waited.  The groups of men, head down to it, waited.  Mr. Pike,
+restless, angry, his blue eyes as bitter as the cold, his mouth as much a-
+snarl as the snarl of the elements with which he fought, waited.  The
+Samurai waited, tranquil, casual, remote.  And Cape Horn waited, there on
+our lee, for the bones of our ship and us.
+
+And then the _Elsinore's_ bow paid off.  The angle of the beat of the
+gale changed, and soon, with dreadful speed, we were dashing straight
+before it and straight toward the rocks we could not see.  But all doubt
+was over.  The success of the manoeuvre was assured.  Mr. Mellaire,
+informed by messenger along the bridge from Mr. Pike, slacked off the
+head-yards.  Mr. Pike, his eye on the helmsman, his hand signalling the
+order, had the wheel put over to port to check the _Elsinore's_ rush into
+the wind as she came up on the starboard tack.  All was activity.  Main-
+and mizzen-yards were braced up, and the _Elsinore_, snugged down and
+hove to, had a lee of thousands of miles of Southern Ocean.
+
+And all this had been accomplished in the stamping ground of storm, at
+the end of the world, by a handful of wretched weaklings, under the drive
+of two strong mates, with behind them the placid will of the Samurai.
+
+It had taken thirty minutes to wear ship, and I had learned how the best
+of shipmasters can lose their ships without reproach.  Suppose the
+_Elsinore_ had persisted in her refusal to payoff?  Suppose anything had
+carried away?  And right here enters Mr. Pike.  It is his task ever to
+see that every rope and block and all the myriad other things in the vast
+and complicated gear of the _Elsinore_ are in strength not to carry away.
+Always have the masters of our race required henchmen like Mr. Pike, and
+it seems the race has well supplied those henchmen.
+
+Ere I went below I heard Captain West tell Mr. Pike that while both
+watches were on deck it would be just as well to put a reef in the
+foresail before they furled it.  The mainsail and the crojack being off,
+I could see the men black on the fore-yard.  For half-an-hour I lingered,
+watching them.  They seemed to make no progress with the reef.  Mr.
+Mellaire was with them, having direct supervision of the job, while Mr.
+Pike, on the poop, growled and grumbled and spat endless blasphemies into
+the flying air.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Two watches on a single yardarm and unable to put a reef in a
+handkerchief like that!" he snorted.  "What'll it be if we're off here a
+month?"
+
+"A month!" I cried.
+
+"A month isn't anything for Cape Stiff," he said grimly.  "I've been off
+here seven weeks and then turned tail and run around the other way."
+
+"Around the world?" I gasped.
+
+"It was the only way to get to 'Frisco," he answered.  "The Horn's the
+Horn, and there's no summer seas that I've ever noticed in this
+neighbourhood."
+
+My fingers were numb and I was chilled through when I took a last look at
+the wretched men on the fore-yard and went below to warm up.
+
+A little later, as I went in to table, through a cabin port I stole a
+look for'ard between seas and saw the men still struggling on the
+freezing yard.
+
+The four of us were at table, and it was very comfortable, in spite of
+the _Elsinore's_ violent antics.  The room was warm.  The storm-racks on
+the table kept each dish in its place.  The steward served and moved
+about with ease and apparent unconcern, although I noticed an occasional
+anxious gleam in his eyes when he poised some dish at a moment when the
+ship pitched and flung with unusual wildness.
+
+And now and again I thought of the poor devils on the yard.  Well, they
+belonged there by right, just as we belonged here by right in this oasis
+of the cabin.  I looked at Mr. Pike and wagered to myself that half-a-
+dozen like him could master that stubborn foresail.  As for the Samurai,
+I was convinced that alone, not moving from his seat, by a tranquil
+exertion of will, he could accomplish the same thing.
+
+The lighted sea-lamps swung and leaped in their gimbals, ever battling
+with the dancing shadows in the murky gray.  The wood-work creaked and
+groaned.  The jiggermast, a huge cylinder of hollow steel that perforated
+the apartment through deck above and floor beneath, was hideously vocal
+with the storm.  Far above, taut ropes beat against it so that it clanged
+like a boiler-shop.  There was a perpetual thunder of seas falling on our
+deck and crash of water against our for'ard wall; while the ten thousand
+ropes and gears aloft bellowed and screamed as the storm smote them.
+
+And yet all this was from without.  Here, at this well-appointed table,
+was no draught nor breath of wind, no drive of spray nor wash of sea.  We
+were in the heart of peace in the midmost centre of the storm.  Margaret
+was in high spirits, and her laughter vied with the clang of the
+jiggermast.  Mr. Pike was gloomy, but I knew him well enough to attribute
+his gloom, not to the elements, but to the inefficients futilely freezing
+on the yard.  As for me, I looked about at the four of us--blue-eyed,
+gray-eyed, all fair-skinned and royal blond--and somehow it seemed that I
+had long since lived this, and that with me and in me were all my
+ancestors, and that their lives and memories were mine, and that all this
+vexation of the sea and air and labouring ship was of old time and a
+thousand times before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+"How are you for a climb?" Margaret asked me, shortly after we had left
+the table.
+
+She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou'wester, and sea-
+boots.
+
+"I've never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed," she
+went on.  "Have you a good head?"
+
+I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged, and
+clapped my hands for Wada.
+
+"Will you?" she cried eagerly.
+
+"If you let me lead," I answered airily, "and if you will promise to hold
+on tight.  Whither away?"
+
+"Into the top of the jigger.  It's the easiest.  As for holding on,
+please remember that I have often done it.  It is with you the doubt
+rests."
+
+"Very well," I retorted; "do you lead then.  I shall hold on tight."
+
+"I have seen many a landsman funk it," she teased.  "There are no lubber-
+holes in our tops."
+
+"And most likely I shall," I agreed.  "I've never been aloft in my life,
+and since there is no hole for a lubber."
+
+She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I
+extended my arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
+
+On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre.  The universe
+was very immediately about us.  It blanketed us in storming wind and
+flying spray and grayness.  Our main deck was impassable, and the relief
+of the wheel came aft along the bridge.  It was two o'clock, and for over
+two hours the frozen wretches had laid out upon the fore-yard.  They were
+still there, weak, feeble, hopeless.  Captain West, stepping out in the
+lee of the chart-house, gazed at them for several minutes.
+
+"We'll have to give up that reef," he said to Mr. Pike.  "Just make the
+sail fast.  Better put on double gaskets."
+
+And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as spray
+and the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for'ard along the
+bridge to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-masted ship that
+could not reef a foresail.
+
+It is true.  They could not do it, despite their willingness, for this I
+have learned: _the men do their weak best whenever the order is given to
+shorten sail_.  It must be that they are afraid.  They lack the iron of
+Mr. Pike, the wisdom and the iron of Captain West.  Always, have I
+noticed, with all the alacrity of which they are capable, do they respond
+to any order to shorten down.  That is why they are for'ard, in that
+pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack the iron.  Well, I can say only
+this: If nothing else could have prevented the funk hinted at by
+Margaret, the sorry spectacle of these ironless, spineless creatures was
+sufficient safeguard.  How could I funk in the face of their weakness--I,
+who lived aft in the high place?
+
+Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the pin-
+rail at the foot of the weather jigger-rigging.  But it was merely the
+recognition of a courtesy on her part, for the next moment she released
+her mittened hand from mine, swung boldly outboard into the face of the
+gale, and around against the ratlines.  Then she began to climb.  I
+followed, almost unaware of the ticklishness of the exploit to a tyro, so
+buoyed up was I by her example and by my scorn of the weaklings for'ard.
+Where men could go, I could go.  What men could do, I could do.  And no
+daughter of the Samurai could out-game me.
+
+Yet it was slow work.  In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts one
+was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging.  At such
+times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor foot.  Also,
+there was no need for holding on.  As I have said, one was pinned against
+the rigging by the wind.
+
+Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me, until
+a fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the sea, in
+which case the result would be frigid drowning.  And still Margaret
+climbed.  Without pause she went out under the overhanging platform of
+the top, shifted her holds to the rigging that went aloft from it, and
+swung around this rigging, easily, carelessly, timing the action to the
+roll, and stood safely upon the top.
+
+I followed.  I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my
+back to the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my
+hands for holds I could not see.  I was in an ecstasy.  I could dare
+anything.  Had she sprung into the air, stretched out her arms, and
+soared away on the breast of the gale, I should have unhesitatingly
+followed her.
+
+As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view, I
+could see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes.  And as I swung
+around the rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in her eyes
+that was quickly routed by petulance.
+
+"Oh, you've done this sort of thing before," she reproached, calling
+loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
+
+I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again.  She nodded
+and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-swirled space
+from the edge of the top.  I sat beside her, looking down into the snow
+that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth out of which we had
+climbed.
+
+We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air on a
+steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into snow.  We
+had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had ceased to be.  But
+no.  Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless wings, driving fully
+eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge albatross.  He must have
+been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.  He had seen his danger ere
+we saw him, and, tilting his body on the blast, he carelessly veered
+clear of collision.  His head and neck were rimed with age or frost--we
+could not tell which--and his bright bead-eye noted us as he passed and
+whirled away on a great circle into the snow to leeward.
+
+Margaret's hand shot out to mine.
+
+"It alone was worth the climb!" she cried.  And then the _Elsinore_ flung
+down, and Margaret's hand clutched tighter for holding, while from the
+hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west wind drift
+upon our decks.
+
+Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
+quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
+beneath us--the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-head
+buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life back on
+top the for'ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-drive of ocean,
+and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr. Mellaire, with a
+handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the tiller.  And we saw the
+Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house, swaying with casual surety
+on the mad deck, as he spoke what must have been instructions to Mr.
+Pike.
+
+The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
+hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea.  Shaggy gray-
+beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the windward murky
+gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the _Elsinore_, one moment
+overtoppling her slender frailness, the next moment splashing a hundred
+tons of water on her deck and flinging her skyward as they passed beneath
+and foamed and crested from sight in the murky gray to leeward.  And the
+great albatrosses veered and circled about us, beating up into the bitter
+violence of the gale and sweeping grandly away before it far faster than
+it blew.
+
+Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent, questioning
+eyes.  With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew aside the ear-
+flap of her sou'wester and shouted:
+
+"It is nothing new.  I have been here before.  In the lives of all my
+fathers have I been here.  The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites my
+nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening.  I
+know, now, that my forbears were Vikings.  I was seed of them in their
+own day.  With them I have raided English coasts, dared the Pillars of
+Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high place of
+government over the soft sun-warm peoples.  I am Hengist and Horsa; I am
+of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them.  I have bearded and bitten
+the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages came to
+be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the mastodon and
+the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the walls of deep-
+buried caves--ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother-
+cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me."
+
+She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
+cheeks, and the _Elsinore_ flung over and down as if she would never rise
+again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying arc.
+Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my ear-flap.
+
+"I don't know anything about it," she cried.  "It sounds like poetry.  But
+I believe it.  It has to be, for it has been.  I have heard it aforetime,
+when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back the frost and
+night."
+
+"And the books?" she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.
+
+"They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools that
+wrote them," I replied.
+
+Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as she
+swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she caught
+footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out of my sight
+under the perilous overhang of the top.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+"What price tobacco?" was Mr. Mellaire's greeting, when I came on deck
+this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle from
+sixty hours of being tossed about.
+
+The wind had fallen to a dead calm toward morning, and the Elsinore, her
+several spread sails booming and slatting, rolled more miserably than
+ever.  Mr. Mellaire pointed for'ard of our starboard beam.  I could make
+out a bleak land of white and jagged peaks.
+
+"Staten Island, the easterly end of it," said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+And I knew that we were in the position of a vessel just rounding Staten
+Island preliminary to bucking the Horn.  And, yet, four days ago, we had
+run through the Straits of Le Maire and stolen along toward the Horn.
+Three days ago we had been well abreast of the Horn and even a few miles
+past.  And here we were now, starting all over again and far in the rear
+of where we had originally started.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The condition of the men is truly wretched.  During the gale the
+forecastle was washed out twice.  This means that everything in it was
+afloat and that every article of clothing, including mattresses and
+blankets, is wet and will remain wet in this bitter weather until we are
+around the Horn and well up in the good-weather latitudes.  The same is
+true of the 'midship-house.  Every room in it, with the exception of the
+cook's and the sail-makers' (which open for'ard on Number Two hatch), is
+soaking.  And they have no fires in their rooms with which to dry things
+out.
+
+I peeped into Charles Davis's room.  It was terrible.  He grinned to me
+and nodded his head.
+
+"It's just as well O'Sullivan wasn't here, sir," he said.  "He'd
+a-drowned in the lower bunk.  And I want to tell you I was doing some
+swimmin' before I could get into the top one.  And salt water's bad for
+my sores.  I oughtn't to be in a hole like this in Cape Horn weather.
+Look at the ice, there, on the floor.  It's below freezin' right now in
+this room, and my blankets are wet, and I'm a sick man, as any man can
+tell that's got a nose."
+
+"If you'd been decent to the mate you might have got decent treatment in
+return," I said.
+
+"Huh!" he sneered.  "You needn't think you can lose me, sir.  I can grow
+fat on this sort of stuff.  Why, sir, when I think of the court doin's in
+Seattle I just couldn't die.  An' if you'll listen to me, sir, you'll
+cover the steward's money.  You can't lose.  I'm advisin' you, sir,
+because you're a sort of decent sort.  Anybody that bets on my going over
+the side is a sure loser."
+
+"How could you dare ship on a voyage like this in your condition?" I
+demanded.
+
+"Condition?" he queried with a fine assumption of innocence.  "Why, that
+is why I did ship.  I was in tiptop shape when I sailed.  All this come
+out on me afterward.  You remember seem' me aloft, an' up to my neck in
+water.  And I trimmed coal below, too.  A sick man couldn't do it.  And
+remember, sir, you'll have to testify to how I did my duty at the
+beginning before I took down."
+
+"I'll bet with you myself if you think I'm goin' to die," he called after
+me.
+
+Already the sailors show marks of the hardship they are enduring.  It is
+surprising, in so short a time, how lean their faces have grown, how
+lined and seamed.  They must dry their underclothing with their body
+heat.  Their outer garments, under their oilskins, are soggy.  And yet,
+paradoxically, despite their lean, drawn faces, they have grown very
+stout.  Their walk is a waddle, and they bulge with seaming corpulency.
+This is due to the amount of clothing they have on.  I noticed Larry, to-
+day, had on two vests, two coats, and an overcoat, with his oilskin
+outside of that.  They are elephantine in their gait for, in addition to
+everything else, they have wrapped their feet, outside their sea-boots,
+with gunny sacking.
+
+It _is_ cold, although the deck thermometer stood at thirty-three to-day
+at noon.  I had Wada weigh the clothing I wear on deck.  Omitting
+oilskins and boots, it came to eighteen pounds.  And yet I am not any too
+warm in all this gear when the wind is blowing.  How sailors, after
+having once experienced the Horn, can ever sign on again for a voyage
+around is beyond me.  It but serves to show how stupid they must be.
+
+I feel sorry for Henry, the training-ship boy.  He is more my own kind,
+and some day he will make a henchman of the afterguard and a mate like
+Mr. Pike.  In the meantime, along with Buckwheat, the other boy who
+berths in the 'midship-house with him, he suffers the same hardship as
+the men.  He is very fair-skinned, and I noticed this afternoon, when he
+was pulling on a brace, that the sleeves of his oil-skins, assisted by
+the salt water, have chafed his wrists till they are raw and bleeding and
+breaking out in sea-boils.  Mr. Mellaire tells me that in another week
+there will be a plague of these boils with all hands for'ard.
+
+"When do you think we'll be up with the Horn again?" I innocently queried
+of Mr. Pike.
+
+He turned upon me in a rage, as if I had insulted him, and positively
+snarled in my face ere he swung away without the courtesy of an answer.
+It is evident that he takes the sea seriously.  That is why, I fancy, he
+is so excellent a seaman.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The days pass--if the interval of sombre gray that comes between the
+darknesses can be called day.  For a week, now, we have not seen the sun.
+Our ship's position in this waste of storm and sea is conjectural.  Once,
+by dead reckoning, we gained up with the Horn and a hundred miles south
+of it.  And then came another sou'west gale that tore our fore-topsail
+and brand new spencer out of the belt-ropes and swept us away to a
+conjectured longitude east of Staten Island.
+
+Oh, I know now this Great West Wind that blows for ever around the world
+south of 55.  And I know why the chart-makers have capitalized it, as,
+for instance, when I read "The Great West Wind Drift."  And I know why
+the _Sailing Directions_ advise: "_Whatever you do_, _make westing_!
+_make westing_!"
+
+And the West Wind and the drift of the West Wind will not permit the
+_Elsinore_ to make westing.  Gale follows gale, always from the west, and
+we make easting.  And it is bitter cold, and each gale snorts up with a
+prelude of driving snow.
+
+In the cabin the lamps burn all day long.  No more does Mr. Pike run the
+phonograph, nor does Margaret ever touch the piano.  She complains of
+being bruised and sore.  I have a wrenched shoulder from being hurled
+against the wall.  And both Wada and the steward are limping.  Really,
+the only comfort I can find is in my bunk, so wedged with boxes and
+pillows that the wildest rolls cannot throw me out.  There, save for my
+meals and for an occasional run on deck for exercise and fresh air, I lie
+and read eighteen and nineteen hours out of the twenty-four.  But the
+unending physical strain is very wearisome.
+
+How it must be with the poor devils for'ard is beyond conceiving.  The
+forecastle has been washed out several times, and everything is soaking
+wet.  Besides, they have grown weaker, and two watches are required to do
+what one ordinary watch could do.  Thus, they must spend as many hours on
+the sea-swept deck and aloft on the freezing yards as I do in my warm,
+dry bunk.  Wada tells me that they never undress, but turn into their wet
+bunks in their oil-skins and sea-boots and wet undergarments.
+
+To look at them crawling about on deck or in the rigging is enough.  They
+are truly weak.  They are gaunt-cheeked and haggard-gray of skin, with
+great dark circles under their eyes.  The predicted plague of sea-boils
+and sea-cuts has come, and their hands and wrists and arms are
+frightfully afflicted.  Now one, and now another, and sometimes several,
+either from being knocked down by seas or from general miserableness,
+take to the bunk for a day or so off.  This means more work for the
+others, so that the men on their feet are not tolerant of the sick ones,
+and a man must be very sick to escape being dragged out to work by his
+mates.
+
+I cannot but marvel at Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs.  Old and fragile as
+they are, it seems impossible that they can endure what they do.  For
+that matter, I cannot understand why they work at all.  I cannot
+understand why any of them toil on and obey an order in this freezing
+hell of the Horn.  Is it because of fear of death that they do not cease
+work and bring death to all of us?  Or is it because they are
+slave-beasts, with a slave-psychology, so used all their lives to being
+driven by their masters that it is beyond their mental power to refuse to
+obey?
+
+And yet most of them, in a week after we reach Seattle, will be on board
+other ships outward bound for the Horn.  Margaret says the reason for
+this is that sailors forget.  Mr. Pike agrees.  He says give them a week
+in the south-east trades as we run up the Pacific and they will have
+forgotten that they have ever been around the Horn.  I wonder.  Can they
+be as stupid as this?  Does pain leave no record with them?  Do they fear
+only the immediate thing?  Have they no horizons wider than a day?  Then
+indeed do they belong where they are.
+
+They _are_ cowardly.  This was shown conclusively this morning at two
+o'clock.  Never have I witnessed such panic fear, and it was fear of the
+immediate thing--fear, stupid and beast-like.  It was Mr. Mellaire's
+watch.  As luck would have it, I was reading Boas's _Mind of Primitive
+Man_ when I heard the rush of feet over my head.  The _Elsinore_ was hove
+to on the port tack at the time, under very short canvas.  I was
+wondering what emergency had brought the watch upon the poop, when I
+heard another rush of feet that meant the second watch.  I heard no
+pulling and hauling, and the thought of mutiny flashed across my mind.
+
+Still nothing happened, and, growing curious, I got into my sea-boots,
+sheepskin coat, and oilskin, put on my sou'wester and mittens, and went
+on deck.  Mr. Pike had already dressed and was ahead of me.  Captain
+West, who in this bad weather sleeps in the chart-room, stood in the lee
+doorway of the house, through which the lamplight streamed on the
+frightened faces of the men.
+
+Those of the 'midship-house were not present, but every man Jack of the
+forecastle, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, as I
+afterwards learned, had joined in the flight aft.  Andy Fay, who belonged
+in the watch below, had calmly remained in his bunk, while Mulligan
+Jacobs had taken advantage of the opportunity to sneak into the
+forecastle and fill his pipe.
+
+"What is the matter, Mr. Pike?" Captain West asked.
+
+Before the mate could reply, Bert Rhine snickered:
+
+"The devil's come aboard, sir."
+
+But his snicker was palpably an assumption of unconcern he did not
+possess.  The more I think over it the more I am surprised that such keen
+men as the gangsters should have been frightened by what had occurred.
+But frightened they were, the three of them, out of their bunks and out
+of the precious surcease of their brief watch below.
+
+So fear-struck was Larry that he chattered and grimaced like an ape, and
+shouldered and struggled to get away from the dark and into the safety of
+the shaft of light that shone out of the chart-house.  Tony, the Greek,
+was just as bad, mumbling to himself and continually crossing himself.  He
+was joined in this, as a sort of chorus, by the two Italians, Guido
+Bombini and Mike Cipriani.  Arthur Deacon was almost in collapse, and he
+and Chantz, the Jew, shamelessly clung to each other for support.  Bob,
+the fat and overgrown youth, was sobbing, while the other youth, Bony the
+Splinter, was shivering and chattering his teeth.  Yes, and the two best
+sailors for'ard, Tom Spink and the Maltese Cockney, stood in the
+background, their backs to the dark, their faces yearning toward the
+light.
+
+More than all other contemptible things in this world there are two that
+I loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice in a man.
+The first turns me to ice.  I cannot sympathize with hysteria.  The
+second turns my stomach.  Cowardice in a man is to me positively
+nauseous.  And this fear-smitten mass of human animals on our reeling
+poop raised my gorge.  Truly, had I been a god at that moment, I should
+have annihilated the whole mass of them.  No; I should have been merciful
+to one.  He was the Faun.  His bright, pain-liquid, and flashing-eager
+eyes strained from face to face with desire to understand.  He did not
+know what had occurred, and, being stone-deaf, had thought the rush aft a
+response to a call for all hands.
+
+I noticed Mr. Mellaire.  He may be afraid of Mr. Pike, and he is a
+murderer; but at any rate he has no fear of the supernatural.  With two
+men above him in authority, although it was his watch, there was no call
+for him to do anything.  He swayed back and forth in balance to the
+violent motions of the _Elsinore_ and looked on with eyes that were
+amused and cynical.
+
+"What does the devil look like, my man?" Captain West asked.
+
+Bert Rhine grinned sheepishly.
+
+"Answer the captain!" Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster's eyes for
+the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl.  Then he replied to Captain
+West:
+
+"I didn't wait to see, sir.  But it's one whale of a devil."
+
+"He's as big as a elephant, sir," volunteered Bill Quigley.  "I seen'm
+face to face, sir.  He almost got me when I run out of the fo'c's'le."
+
+"Oh, Lord, sir!" Larry moaned.  "The way he hit the house, sir.  It was
+the call to Judgment."
+
+"Your theology is mixed, my man," Captain West smiled quietly, though I
+could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his
+wonderful Samurai eyes.
+
+He turned to the mate.
+
+"Mr. Pike, will you please go for'ard and interview this devil?  Fasten
+him up and tie him down and I'll take a look at him in the morning."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr. Pike; and Kipling's line came to me:
+
+   "Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?"
+
+And as I went for'ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and Mr.
+Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge--not a sailor
+dared to accompany us--other lines of "The Galley Slave" drifted through
+my brain, such as:
+
+   "Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold--
+   We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . "
+
+And:
+
+   "By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,
+   By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . . . "
+
+And:
+
+   "Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone by
+   . . . "
+
+And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of the
+race, and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful
+henchman, the able sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and galled,
+the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea.  I know him
+now.  He can never again offend me.  I forgive him everything--the
+whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at Baltimore, his
+moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his savagery to the men, his
+snarl and his sneer.
+
+On top the 'midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to
+recall.  I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin about my
+neck, so that I was wet to the skin.  We crossed the next span of bridge
+through driving spray, and were well upon the top of the for'ard-house
+when something adrift on the deck hit the for'ard wall a terrific smash.
+
+"Whatever it is, it's playing the devil," Mr. Pike yelled in my ear, as
+he endeavoured to locate the thing by the dry-battery light-stick which
+he carried.
+
+The pencil of light travelled over dark water, white with foam, that
+churned upon the deck.
+
+"There it goes!" Mr. Pike cried, as the _Elsinore_ dipped by the head and
+hurtled the water for'ard.
+
+The light went out as the three of us caught holds and crouched to a
+deluge of water from overside.  As we emerged, from under the forecastle-
+head we heard a tremendous thumping and battering.  Then, as the bow
+lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that immediately lost it, I
+glimpsed a vague black object that bounded down the inclined deck where
+no water was.  What became of it we could not see.
+
+Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire.  Again, as the
+_Elsinore_ dipped by the head and fetched a surge of sea-water from aft
+along the runway, I saw the dark object bound for'ard directly at the
+mates.  They sprang to safety from its charge, the light went out, while
+another icy sea broke aboard.
+
+For a time I could see nothing of the two men.  Next, in the light
+flashed from the stick, I guessed that Mr. Pike was in pursuit of the
+thing.  He evidently must have captured it at the rail against the
+starboard rigging and caught a turn around it with a loose end of rope.
+As the vessel rolled to windward some sort of a struggle seemed to be
+going on.  The second mate sprang to the mate's assistance, and,
+together, with more loose ends, they seemed to subdue the thing.
+
+I descended to see.  By the light-stick we made it out to be a large,
+barnacle-crusted cask.
+
+"She's been afloat for forty years," was Mr. Pike's judgment.  "Look at
+the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers."
+
+"And it's full of something," said Mr. Mellaire.  "Hope it isn't water."
+
+I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for'ard, between
+seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the shelter under
+the forecastle-head.  As a result, even through my mittens, I was cut by
+the sharp edges of broken shell.
+
+"It's liquor of some sort," said the mate, "but we won't risk broaching
+it till morning."
+
+"But where did it come from?" I asked.
+
+"Over the side's the only place it could have come from."  Mr. Pike
+played the light over it.  "Look at it!  It's been afloat for years and
+years."
+
+"The stuff ought to be well-seasoned," commented Mr. Mellaire.
+
+Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the
+forecastle and peered in.  The men, in their headlong flight, had
+neglected to close the doors, and the place was afloat.  In the
+flickering light from a small and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal
+picture.  No self-respecting cave-man, I am sure, would have lived in
+such a hole.
+
+Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house and
+rail, and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water rushed
+waist-deep.  I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the room.  From
+a top bunk, lying on his side, Andy Fay regarded me steadily with his
+bitter blue eyes.  Seated on the rough table of heavy planks, his sea-
+booted feet swinging in the water, Mulligan Jacobs pulled at his pipe.
+When he observed me he pointed to pulpy book-pages that floated about.
+
+"Me library's gone to hell," he mourned as he indicated the flotsam.
+"There's me Byron.  An' there goes Zola an' Browning with a piece of
+Shakespeare runnin' neck an' neck, an' what's left of _Anti-Christ_
+makin' a bad last.  An' there's Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl you
+can't tell 'em apart."
+
+Here the _Elsinore_ lay down to starboard, and the water in the
+forecastle poured out against my legs and hips.  My wet mittens slipped
+on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the scuppers, where I
+was turned over and over by another flood that had just boarded from
+windward.
+
+I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal of
+salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and climbed to
+the top of the house.  On my way aft along the bridge I encountered the
+crew coming for'ard.  Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were talking in the lee
+of the chart-house, and inside, as I passed below, Captain West was
+smoking a cigar.
+
+After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk
+with the _Mind of Primitive Man_ before me, when the stampede over my
+head was repeated.  I waited for the second rush.  It came, and I
+proceeded to dress.
+
+The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men were
+more excited, more frightened.  They were babbling and chattering all
+together.
+
+"Shut up!" Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them.  "One at a time,
+and answer the captain's question."
+
+"It ain't no barrel this time, sir," Tom Spink said.  "It's alive.  An'
+if it ain't the devil it's the ghost of a drownded man.  I see 'm plain
+an' clear.  He's a man, or was a man once--"
+
+"They was two of 'em, sir," Richard Giller, one of the "bricklayers,"
+broke in.
+
+"I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir," Tom Spink went on.
+
+"An' the other was Jespersen--I seen 'm," Giller added.
+
+"They was three of 'em, sir," said Nosey Murphy.  "O'Sullivan, sir, was
+the other one.  They ain't devils, sir.  They're drownded men.  They come
+aboard right over the bows, an' they moved slow like drownded men.
+Sorensen seen the first one first.  He caught my arm an' pointed, an'
+then I seen 'm.  He was on top the for'ard-house.  And Olansen seen 'm,
+an' Deacon, sir, an' Hackey.  We all seen 'm, sir . . . an' the second
+one; an' when the rest run away I stayed long enough to see the third
+one.  Mebbe there's more.  I didn't wait to see."
+
+Captain West stopped the man.
+
+"Mr. Pike," he said wearily, "will you straighten this nonsense out."
+
+"Yes, sir," Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the man.  "Come on, all of
+you!  There's three devils to tie down this time."
+
+But the men shrank away from the order and from him.
+
+"For two cents . . . " I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke off
+utterance.
+
+He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge.  In the same order
+as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up the rear,
+we followed.  It was a similar journey, save that we caught a ducking
+midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on the 'midship-
+house.
+
+We halted on top the for'ard-house.  In vain Mr. Pike flashed his light-
+stick.  Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked dark
+water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the crash and
+thunder of seas falling aboard.  We advanced half-way across the last
+span of bridge to the fore-castle head, and were driven to pause and hang
+on at the foremast by a bursting sea.
+
+Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick.  I heard him
+exclaim something.  Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed by
+Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and endured
+another ducking.  Through the emergencies I could see the pencil of
+light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there.  Several
+minutes later the mates were back with me.
+
+"Half our head-gear's carried away," Mr. Pike told me.  "We must have run
+into something."
+
+"I felt a jar, right after you' went below, sir, last time," said Mr.
+Mellaire.  "Only I thought it was a thump of sea."
+
+"So did I feel it," the mate agreed.  "I was just taking off my boots.  I
+thought it was a sea.  But where are the three devils?"
+
+"Broaching the cask," the second mate suggested.
+
+We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went for'ard,
+inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea.  There lay the cask,
+securely lashed.  The size of the barnacles on it was astonishing.  They
+were as large as apples and inches deep.  A down-fling of bow brought a
+foot of water about our boots; and as the bow lifted and the water
+drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted cask streamers of
+seaweed a foot or so in length.
+
+Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the
+deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for'ard-house and
+found no devils.  The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his
+light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky
+sea-lamp.  And we saw the devils.  Nosey Murphy had been right.  There
+were three of them.
+
+Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty, paint-
+scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with the
+filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea.  In a top bunk, on
+his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily with blue, bitter
+eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe, with hanging legs
+dragged this way and that by the churn of water, Mulligan Jacobs,
+solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody, who stand side by
+side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the
+_Elsinore's_ down-flinging and up-lifting.
+
+But such men!  I know my East Side and my East End, and I am accustomed
+to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was at
+fault.  The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had
+Scandinavia.  They were not blonds.  They were not brunettes.  Nor were
+they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow.  Their skin was white under a
+bronze of weather.  Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless,
+sandy hair.  Yet their eyes were dark--and yet not dark.  They were
+neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel.  Nor were they black.  They
+were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of
+great cats.  They regarded us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired
+storm-waifs with pale, topaz eyes.  They did not bow, they did not smile,
+in no way did they recognize our presence save that they looked at us and
+dreamed.
+
+But Andy Fay greeted us.
+
+"It's a hell of a night an' not a wink of sleep with these goings-on," he
+said.
+
+"Now where did they blow in from a night like this?" Mulligan Jacobs
+complained.
+
+"You've got a tongue in your mouth," Mr. Pike snarled.  "Why ain't you
+asked 'em?"
+
+"As though you didn't know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you old
+stiff," Jacobs snarled back.
+
+But it was no time for their private feud.  Mr. Pike turned on the
+dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted phrases
+of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon has had
+every opportunity to learn but is too stubborn-brained and wilful-mouthed
+to wrap his tongue about.
+
+The visitors made no reply.  They did not even shake their heads.  Their
+faces remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and pleasant,
+while in their eyes floated profounder dreams.  Yet they were human.  The
+blood of their injuries stained them and clotted on their clothes.
+
+"Dutchmen," snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other breeds, as
+he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.
+
+Mr. Pike's ethnology is narrow.  Outside his own race he is aware of only
+three races: niggers, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.
+
+Again our visitors proved themselves human.  They understood the mate's
+invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed into three
+top-bunks and closed their eyes.  I could swear the first of them was
+asleep in half a minute.
+
+"We'll have to clean up for'ard, or we'll be having the sticks about our
+ears," the mate said, already starting to depart.  "Get the men along,
+Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+And no westing!  We have been swept back three degrees of casting since
+the night our visitors came on board.  They are the great mystery, these
+three men of the sea.  "Horn Gypsies," Margaret calls them; and Mr. Pike
+dubs them "Dutchmen."  One thing is certain, they have a language of
+their own which they talk with one another.  But of our hotch-potch of
+nationalities fore and aft there is no person who catches an inkling of
+their language or nationality.
+
+Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but
+this was indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter, who
+swears he is a Finn himself.  Louis, the cook, avers that somewhere over
+the world, on some forgotten voyage, he has encountered men of their
+type; but he can neither remember the voyage nor their race.  He and the
+rest of the Asiatics accept their presence as a matter of course; but the
+crew, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very
+superstitious about the new-comers, and will have nothing to do with
+them.
+
+"No good will come of them, sir," Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us,
+shaking his head forebodingly.
+
+Margaret's mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy roll
+of the ship.  We had paused from our promenade, which we now take each
+day, religiously, as a constitutional, between eleven and twelve.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with them?" she queried, nudging me privily in
+warning of what was coming.
+
+"Because they ain't men, Miss, as we can rightly call men.  They ain't
+regular men."
+
+"It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board," she gurgled.
+
+"That's just it, Miss," Tom Spink exclaimed, brightening perceptibly at
+the hint of understanding.  "Where'd they come from?  They won't tell.  Of
+course they won't tell.  They ain't men.  They're spirits--ghosts of
+sailors that drowned as long ago as when that cask went adrift from a
+sinkin' ship, an' that's years an' years, Miss, as anybody can see,
+lookin' at the size of the barnacles on it."
+
+"Do you think so?" Margaret queried.
+
+"We all think so, Miss.  We ain't spent our lives on the sea for nothin'.
+There's no end of landsmen don't believe in the Flyin' Dutchman.  But
+what do they know?  They're just landsmen, ain't they?  They ain't never
+had their leg grabbed by a ghost, such as I had, on the _Kathleen_,
+thirty-five years ago, down in the hole 'tween the water-casks.  An'
+didn't that ghost rip the shoe right off of me?  An' didn't I fall
+through the hatch two days later an' break my shoulder?"
+
+"Now, Miss, I seen 'em makin' signs to Mr. Pike that we'd run into their
+ship hove to on the other tack.  Don't you believe it.  There wasn't no
+ship."
+
+"But how do you explain the carrying away of our head-gear?" I demanded.
+
+"There's lots of things can't be explained, sir," was Tom Spink's answer.
+"Who can explain the way the Finns plays tom-fool tricks with the
+weather?  Yet everybody knows it.  Why are we havin' a hard passage
+around the Horn, sir?  I ask you that.  Why, sir?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Because of the carpenter, sir.  We've found out he's a Finn.  Why did he
+keep it quiet all the way down from Baltimore?"
+
+"Why did he tell it?" Margaret challenged.
+
+"He didn't tell it, Miss--leastways, not until after them three others
+boarded us.  I got my suspicions he knows more about 'm than he's lettin'
+on.  An' look at the weather an' the delay we're gettin'.  An' don't
+everybody know the Finns is regular warlocks an' weather-breeders?"
+
+My ears pricked up.
+
+"Where did you get that word _warlock_?" I questioned.
+
+Tom Spink looked puzzled.
+
+"What's wrong with it, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Nothing.  It's all right.  But where did you get it?"
+
+"I never got it, sir.  I always had it.  That's what Finns is--warlocks."
+
+"And these three new-comers--they aren't Finns?" asked Margaret.
+
+The old Englishman shook his head solemnly.
+
+"No, Miss.  They're drownded sailors a long time drownded.  All you have
+to do is look at 'm.  An' the carpenter could tell us a few if he was
+minded."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Nevertheless, our mysterious visitors are a welcome addition to our
+weakened crew.  I watch them at work.  They are strong and willing.  Mr.
+Pike says they are real sailormen, even if he doesn't understand their
+lingo.  His theory is that they are from some small old-country or
+outlander ship, which, hove to on the opposite tack to the _Elsinore_,
+was run down and sunk.
+
+I have forgotten to say that we found the barnacled cask nearly filled
+with a most delicious wine which none of us can name.  As soon as the
+gale moderated Mr. Pike had the cask brought aft and broached, and now
+the steward and Wada have it all in bottles and spare demijohns.  It is
+beautifully aged, and Mr. Pike is certain that it is some sort of a mild
+and unheard-of brandy.  Mr. Mellaire merely smacks his lips over it,
+while Captain West, Margaret, and I steadfastly maintain that it is wine.
+
+The condition of the men grows deplorable.  They were always poor at
+pulling on ropes, but now it takes two or three to pull as much as one
+used to pull.  One thing in their favour is that they are well, though
+grossly, fed.  They have all they want to eat, such as it is, but it is
+the cold and wet, the terrible condition of the forecastle, the lack of
+sleep, and the almost continuous toil of both watches on deck.  Either
+watch is so weak and worthless that any severe task requires the
+assistance of the other watch.  As an instance, we finally managed a reef
+in the foresail in the thick of a gale.  It took both watches two hours,
+yet Mr. Pike tells me that under similar circumstances, with an average
+crew of the old days, he has seen a single watch reef the foresail in
+twenty minutes.
+
+I have learned one of the prime virtues of a steel sailing-ship.  Such a
+craft, heavily laden, does not strain her seams open in bad weather and
+big seas.  Except for a tiny leak down in the fore-peak, with which we
+sailed from Baltimore and which is bailed out with a pail once in several
+weeks, the _Elsinore_ is bone-dry.  Mr. Pike tells me that had a wooden
+ship of her size and cargo gone through the buffeting we have endured,
+she would be leaking like a sieve.
+
+And Mr. Mellaire, out of his own experience, has added to my respect for
+the Horn.  When he was a young man he was once eight weeks in making
+around from 50 in the Atlantic to 50 in the Pacific.  Another time his
+vessel was compelled to put back twice to the Falklands for repairs.  And
+still another time, in a wooden ship running back in distress to the
+Falklands, his vessel was lost in a shift of gale in the very entrance to
+Port Stanley.  As he told me:
+
+"And after we'd been there a month, sir, who should come in but the old
+_Lucy Powers_.  She was a sight!--her foremast clean gone out of her and
+half her spars, the old man killed from one of the spars falling on him,
+the mate with two broken arms, the second mate sick, and what was left of
+the crew at the pumps.  We'd lost our ship, so my skipper took charge,
+refitted her, doubled up both crews, and we headed the other way around,
+pumping two hours in every watch clear to Honolulu."
+
+The poor wretched chickens!  Because of their ill-judged moulting they
+are quite featherless.  It is a marvel that one of them survives, yet so
+far we have lost only six.  Margaret keeps the kerosene stove going, and,
+though they have ceased laying, she confidently asserts that they are all
+layers and that we shall have plenty of eggs once we get fine weather in
+the Pacific.
+
+There is little use to describe these monotonous and perpetual westerly
+gales.  One is very like another, and they follow so fast on one
+another's heels that the sea never has a chance to grow calm.  So long
+have we rolled and tossed about that the thought, say, of a solid,
+unmoving billiard-table is inconceivable.  In previous incarnations I
+have encountered things that did not move, but . . . they were in
+previous incarnations.
+
+We have been up to the Diego Ramirez Rocks twice in the past ten days.  At
+the present moment, by vague dead reckoning, we are two hundred miles
+east of them.  We have been hove down to our hatches three times in the
+last week.  We have had six stout sails, of the heaviest canvas, furled
+and double-gasketed, torn loose and stripped from the yards.  Sometimes,
+so weak are our men, not more than half of them can respond to the call
+for all hands.
+
+Lars Jacobson, who had his leg broken early in the voyage, was knocked
+down by a sea several days back and had the leg rebroken.  Ditman
+Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian, went Berserker last night in the
+second dog-watch and pretty well cleaned out his half of the forecastle.
+Wada reports that it required the bricklayers, Fitzgibbon and Gilder, the
+Maltese Cockney, and Steve Roberts, the cowboy, finally to subdue the
+madman.  These are all men of Mr. Mellaire's watch.  In Mr. Pike's watch
+John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum, who has stood out against the
+gangsters, has at last succumbed and joined them.  And only this morning
+Mr. Pike dragged Charles Davis by the scruff of the neck out of the
+forecastle, where he had caught him expounding sea-law to the miserable
+creatures.  Mr. Mellaire, I notice on occasion, remains unduly intimate
+with the gangster clique.  And yet nothing serious happens.
+
+And Charles Davis does not die.  He seems actually to be gaining in
+weight.  He never misses a meal.  From the break of the poop, in the
+shelter of the weather cloth, our decks a thunder and rush of freezing
+water, I often watch him slip out of his room between seas, mug and plate
+in hand, and hobble for'ard to the galley for his food.  He is a keen
+judge of the ship's motions, for never yet have I seen him get a serious
+ducking.  Sometimes, of course, he may get splattered with spray or wet
+to the knees, but he manages to be out of the way whenever a big
+graybeard falls on board.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+A wonderful event to-day!  For five minutes, at noon, the sun was
+actually visible.  But such a sun!--a pale and cold and sickly orb that
+at meridian was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon.  And within
+the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the snow-gusts of a
+fresh south-west gale.
+
+_Whatever you do_, _make westing_! _make westing_!--this sailing rule of
+the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron.  I can
+understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
+sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a boat.
+Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around from east
+to west.
+
+And we make easting!  This west wind is eternal.  I listen incredulously
+when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when easterly winds have
+blown in these latitudes.  It is impossible.  Always does the west wind
+blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting, else why the "Great West Wind
+Drift" printed on the charts!  We of the afterguard are weary of this
+eternal buffeting.  Our men have become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded
+shadows of men.  I should not be surprised, in the end, to see Captain
+West turn tail and run eastward around the world to Seattle.  But
+Margaret smiles with surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her
+father will win around to 50 in the Pacific.
+
+How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room of
+iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me that the
+wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down in their
+bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of the watches.
+
+Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty miles
+due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a driving
+gale, on the port tack.  The glass is down to 28.58, and even Mr. Pike
+acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters he has ever
+experienced.
+
+In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64 degrees
+or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a favouring
+spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the extreme-narrowing
+wedges of longitude.  But of late years all shipmasters have accepted the
+hugging of the land all the way around.  Out of ten times ten thousand
+passages of Cape Stiff from east to west, this, they have concluded, is
+the best strategy.  So Captain West hugs the land.  He heaves-to on the
+port tack until the leeward drift brings the land into perilous
+proximity, then wears ship and heaves-to on the port tack and makes
+leeway off shore.
+
+I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
+frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it.  In my brain burns the
+flame of a great discovery and a great achievement.  I have found what
+makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
+philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make.  I have
+found the love of woman.  I do not know whether she cares for me.  Nor is
+that the point.  The point is that in myself I have risen to the greatest
+height to which the human male animal can rise.
+
+I know a woman and her name is Margaret.  She is Margaret, a woman and
+desirable.  My blood is red.  I am not the pallid scholar I so proudly
+deemed myself to be.  I am a man, and a lover, despite the books.  As for
+De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I
+shall confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the
+schools.  Love is the final word.  To the rational man it alone gives the
+super-rational sanction for living.  Like Bergson in his overhanging
+heaven of intuition, or like one who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and
+seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod the materialistic dictums of
+science underfoot, scaled the last peak of philosophy, and leaped into my
+heaven, which, after all, is within myself.  The stuff that composes me,
+that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme realization in the love
+of woman.  It is the vindication of being.  Yes, and it is the wages of
+being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh
+and breath.
+
+And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know what
+women are.  And I know Margaret for what she is--mere woman; and yet I
+know, in the lover's soul of me, that she is somehow different.  Her ways
+are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are delightful to
+me.  In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-builder, for of a
+surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways.  And who shall say which
+is the worthier--the writing of a whole library or the building of a
+nest?
+
+The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by.  It is now a
+month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are, not so
+well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a hundred
+miles south of the Straits of Le Maire.  Even this position is
+conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the leeway of a
+ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with always the
+Great West Wind Drift making against us.  It is four days since our last
+instrument-sight of the sun.
+
+This storm-vexed ocean has become populous.  No ships are getting round,
+and each day adds to our number.  Never a brief day passes without our
+sighting from two or three to a dozen hove-to on port tack or starboard
+tack.  Captain West estimates there must be at least two hundred sail of
+us.  A ship hove-to with preventer tackles on the rudder-head is
+unmanageable.  Each night we take our chance of unavoidable and
+disastrous collision.  And at times, glimpsed through the snow-squalls,
+we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive past us with the West
+Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs.  And so wild is the mind of
+man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still aver that on occasion they have
+known gales to blow ships from east to west around the Horn.  It surely
+has been a year since we of the _Elsinore_ emerged from under the lee of
+Tierra Del Fuego into the snorting south-west gales.  A century, at
+least, has elapsed since we sailed from Baltimore.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And I don't give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of this
+dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth.  I have told Margaret that I love
+her.  The tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth, where we
+clung together in the second dog-watch last evening.  And it was told
+again, and by both of us, in the bright-lighted chart-room after the
+watches had been changed at eight bells.  Yes, and her face was storm-
+bright, and all of her was very proud, save that her eyes were warm and
+soft and fluttered with lids that just would flutter maidenly and
+womanly.  It was a great hour--our great hour.
+
+A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved.  Grievous
+indeed must be the fate of the lover who is unloved.  And I, for one, and
+for still other reasons, congratulate myself upon the vastitude of my
+good fortune.  For see, were Margaret any other sort of a woman, were she
+. . . well, just the lovely and lovable and adorably snuggly sort who
+seem made just precisely for love and loving and nestling into the strong
+arms of a man--why, there wouldn't be anything remarkable or wonderful
+about her loving me.  But Margaret is Margaret, strong, self-possessed,
+serene, controlled, a very mistress of herself.  And there's the
+miracle--that such a woman should have been awakened to love by me.  It
+is almost unbelievable.  I go out of my way to get another peep into
+those long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting soft as she
+looks at me.  She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank the Lord I am
+no Romeo.  And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and under my
+breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards
+thundering down on us, that I am a lover.  And I send messages to the
+lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover.  And I
+look at the wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge and
+know that never in ten thousand wretched lives could they experience the
+love I experience, and I wonder why God ever made them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start," Margaret
+confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from my
+arms, "was that I would not permit you to make love to me."
+
+"True daughter of Herodias," I gaily gibed, "so such was the drift of
+your thoughts even as early as the very start.  Already you were looking
+upon me with a considerative female eye."
+
+She laughed proudly, and did not reply.
+
+"What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
+you?" I insisted.
+
+"Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages," she
+replied.
+
+"Then others have . . . ?"
+
+"They always do," she assured me gravely.
+
+And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but I
+laughed it away and retorted:
+
+"It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as having
+said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered, namely, that a
+woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of him."
+
+"Wretch!" she cried.  "I never fluttered.  When did I ever flutter!"
+
+"It is a delicate subject . . . " I began with assumed hesitancy.
+
+"When did I ever flutter?" she demanded.
+
+I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer's ruses by making a shift.
+
+"From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to miss
+observing," I charged.  "I'll wager you knew as quickly as I the very
+instant when I first loved you."
+
+"I knew the first time you hated me," she evaded.
+
+"Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were coming
+on the voyage," I said.  "But now I repeat my challenge.  You knew as
+quickly as I the first instant I loved you."
+
+Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
+tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a low,
+quiet voice said:
+
+"Yes, I . . . I think I know.  It was the morning of that pampero off the
+Plate, when you were thrown through the door into my father's stateroom.
+I saw it in your eyes.  I knew it.  I think it was the first time, the
+very instant."
+
+I could only nod my head and draw her close to me.  And she looked up at
+me and added:
+
+"You were very ridiculous.  There you sat, on the bed, holding on with
+one hand and nursing the other hand under your arm, staring at me,
+irritated, startled, utterly foolish, and then . . . how, I don't know
+. . . I knew that you had just come to know . . . "
+
+"And the very next instant you froze up," I charged ungallantly.
+
+"And that was why," she admitted shamelessly, then leaned away from me,
+her hands resting on my shoulders, while she gurgled and her lips parted
+from over her beautiful white teeth.
+
+One thing I, John Pathurst, know: that gurgling laughter of hers is the
+most adorable laughter that was ever heard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+I wonder.  I wonder.  Did the Samurai make a mistake?  Or was it the
+darkness of oncoming death that chilled and clouded that star-cool brain
+of his, and made a mock of all his wisdom?  Or was it the blunder that
+brought death upon him beforehand?  I do not know, I shall never know;
+for it is a matter no one of us dreams of hinting at, much less
+discussing.
+
+I shall begin at the beginning--yesterday afternoon.  For it was
+yesterday afternoon, five weeks to a day since we emerged from the
+Straits of Le Maire into this gray storm-ocean, that once again we found
+ourselves hove to directly off the Horn.  At the changing of the watches
+at four o'clock, Captain West gave the command to Mr. Pike to wear ship.
+We were on the starboard tack at the time, making leeway off shore.  This
+manoeuvre placed us on the port tack, and the consequent leeway, to me,
+seemed on shore, though at an acute angle, to be sure.
+
+In the chart-room, glancing curiously at the chart, I measured the
+distance with my eye and decided that we were in the neighbourhood of
+fifteen miles off Cape Horn.
+
+"With our drift we'll be close up under the land by morning, won't we?" I
+ventured tentatively.
+
+"Yes," Captain West nodded; "and if it weren't for the West Wind Drift,
+and if the land did not trend to the north-east, we'd be ashore by
+morning.  As it is, we'll be well under it at daylight, ready to steal
+around if there is a change, ready to wear ship if there is no change."
+
+It did not enter my head to question his judgment.  What he said had to
+be.  Was he not the Samurai?
+
+And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr. Pike
+enter the chart-house.  After several paces up and down, and a brief
+pause to watch Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth from lee to
+weather, I strolled aft to the chart-house.  Prompted by I know not what,
+I peeped through one of the glass ports.
+
+There stood Mr. Pike, his sou'wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
+rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in hand,
+bent over the chart.  It was the expression of his face that startled me.
+The habitual sourness had vanished.  All that I could see was anxiety and
+apprehension . . . yes, and age.  I had never seen him look so old; for
+there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage and weariness of all his
+sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-staring.
+
+I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of the
+poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and spray in the
+conjectural direction of our drift.  Somewhere, there, in the north-east
+and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks upon which the
+graybeards thundered.  And there, in the chart-room, a redoubtable
+sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and calculated, and
+measured and calculated again, our position and our drift.
+
+And I knew it could not be.  It was not the Samurai but the henchman who
+was weak and wrong.  Age was beginning to tell upon him at last, which
+could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that no man in
+ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.
+
+I laughed at my moment's qualm of foolishness and went below, well
+content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father's wisdom.
+Of course he was right.  He had proved himself right too often already on
+the long voyage from Baltimore.
+
+At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait.  He took no part whatever in the
+conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
+without--to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
+jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the smash
+and crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron walls.
+
+Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too
+discreet to question him then, or afterwards alone, about his trouble.  At
+eight he went on deck again to take the watch till midnight, and as I
+went to bed I dismissed all forebodings and speculated as to how many
+more voyages he could last after this sudden onslaught of old age.
+
+I fell asleep quickly, and awoke at midnight, my lamp still burning,
+Conrad's _Mirror of the Sea_ on my breast where it had dropped from my
+hands.  I heard the watches change, and was wide awake and reading when
+Mr. Pike came below by the booby-hatch and passed down my hail by my open
+door, on his way to his room.
+
+In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a
+cigarette.  Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the cigarette
+was lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his lungs.
+
+At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad's delightful chapter, "The
+Weight of the Burden," I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall.
+
+Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-booted,
+oilskinned, sou'westered.  It was his watch below, and his sleep was
+meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on deck.
+
+I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that
+somewhere up above he was staring into the driving dark.  I dressed
+fully, in all my heavy storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou'-wester to
+sheepskin under my oilskin coat.  At the foot of the stairs I noted along
+the hall that Margaret's light was burning.  I peeped in--she keeps her
+door open for ventilation--and found her reading.
+
+"Merely not sleepy," she assured me.
+
+Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension.  She does
+not know even now, I am confident, the Samurai's blunder--if blunder it
+was.  As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although there is no
+telling in what occult ways she may have received though not recognized
+Mr. Pike's anxiety.
+
+At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the lee
+door of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room.  On the couch,
+lying on his back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought, slept Captain
+West.  The room was warm from the ascending heat of the cabin, so that he
+lay unblanketed, fully dressed save for oilskins and boots.  He breathed
+easily and steadily, and the lean, ascetic lines of his face seemed
+softened by the light of the low-turned lamp.  And that one glance
+restored to me all my surety and faith in his wisdom, so that I laughed
+at myself for having left my warm bed for a freezing trip on deck.
+
+Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr. Mellaire.  He
+was wide awake, but under no strain.  Evidently it had not entered his
+mind to consider, much less question, the manoeuvre of wearing ship the
+previous afternoon.
+
+"The gale is breaking," he told me, waving his mittened hand at a starry
+segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds.
+
+But where was Mr. Pike?  Did the second mate know he was on deck?  I
+proceeded to feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along the
+mad poop toward the wheel.  I talked about the difficulty of sleeping in
+stormy weather, stated the restlessness and semi-insomnia that the
+violent motion of the ship caused in me, and raised the query of how bad
+weather affected the officers.
+
+"I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping like a
+baby," I concluded.
+
+We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.
+
+"Trust us to sleep just the same way, Mr. Pathurst," the second mate
+laughed.  "The harder the weather the harder the demand on us, and the
+harder we sleep.  I'm dead the moment my head touches the pillow.  It
+takes Mr. Pike longer, because he always finishes his cigarette after he
+turns in.  But he smokes while he's undressing, so that he doesn't
+require more than a minute to go deado.  I'll wager he hasn't moved,
+right now, since ten minutes after twelve."
+
+So the second mate did not dream the first was even on deck.  I went
+below to make sure.  A small sea-lamp was burning in Mr. Pike's room, and
+I saw his bunk unoccupied.  I went in by the big stove in the dining-room
+and warmed up, then again came on deck.  I did not go near the weather
+cloth, where I was certain Mr. Mellaire was; but, keeping along the lee
+of the poop, I gained the bridge and started for'ard.
+
+I was in no hurry, so I paused often in that cold, wet journey.  The gale
+was breaking, for again and again the stars glimmered through the
+thinning storm-clouds.  On the 'midship-house was no Mr. Pike.  I crossed
+it, stung by the freezing, flying spray, and carefully reconnoitred the
+top of the for'ard-house, where, in such bad weather, I knew the lookout
+was stationed.  I was within twenty feet of them, when a wider clearance
+of starry sky showed me the figures of the lookout, whoever he was, and
+of Mr. Pike, side by side.  Long I watched them, not making my presence
+known, and I knew that the old mate's eyes were boring like gimlets into
+the windy darkness that separated the _Elsinore_ from the thunder-surfed
+iron coast he sought to find.
+
+Coming back to the poop I was caught by the surprised Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"Thought you were asleep, sir," he chided.
+
+"I'm too restless," I explained.  "I've read until my eyes are tired, and
+now I'm trying to get chilled so that I can fall asleep while warming up
+in my blankets."
+
+"I envy you, sir," he answered.  "Think of it!  So much of all night in
+that you cannot sleep.  Some day, if ever I make a lucky strike, I shall
+make a voyage like this as a passenger, and have all watches below.  Think
+of it!  All blessed watches below!  And I shall, like you, sir, bring a
+Jap servant along, and I'll make him call me at every changing of the
+watches, so that, wide awake, I can appreciate my good fortune in the
+several minutes before I roll over and go to sleep again."
+
+We laughed good night to each other.  Another peep into the chart-room
+showed me Captain West sleeping as before.  He had not moved in general,
+though all his body moved with every roll and fling of the ship.  Below,
+Margaret's light still burned, but a peep showed her asleep, her book
+fallen from her hands just as was the so frequent case with my books.
+
+And I wondered.  Half the souls of us on the _Elsinore_ slept.  The
+Samurai slept.  Yet the old first mate, who should have slept, kept a
+bitter watch on the for'ard-house.  Was his anxiety right?  Could it be
+right?  Or was it the crankiness of ultimate age?  Were we drifting and
+leewaying to destruction?  Or was it merely an old man being struck down
+by senility in the midst of his life-task?
+
+Too wide awake to think of sleeping, I ensconced myself with _The Mirror
+of the Sea_ at the dining-table.  Nor did I remove aught of my storm-gear
+save the soggy mittens, which I wrung out and hung to dry by the stove.
+Four bells struck, and six bells, and Mr. Pike had not returned below.  At
+eight bells, with the changing of the watches, it came upon me what a
+night of hardship the old mate was enduring.  Eight to twelve had been
+his own watch on deck.  He had now completed the four hours of the second
+mate's watch and was beginning his own watch, which would last till eight
+in the morning--twelve consecutive hours in a Cape Horn gale with the
+mercury at freezing.
+
+Next--for I had dozed--I heard loud cries above my head that were
+repeated along the poop.  I did not know till afterwards that it was Mr.
+Pike's command to hard-up the helm, passed along from for'ard by the men
+he had stationed at intervals on the bridge.
+
+All that I knew at this shock of waking was that something was happening
+above.  As I pulled on my steaming mittens and hurried my best up the
+reeling stairs, I could hear the stamp of men's feet that for once were
+not lagging.  In the chart-house hall I heard Mr. Pike, who had already
+covered the length of the bridge from the for'ard-house, shouting:
+
+"Mizzen-braces!  Slack, damn you!  Slack on the run!  But hold a turn!
+Aft, here, all of you!  Jump!  Lively, if you don't want to swim!  Come
+in, port-braces!  Don't let 'm get away!  Lee-braces!--if you lose that
+turn I'll split your skull!  Lively!  Lively!--Is that helm hard over!
+Why in hell don't you answer?"
+
+All this I heard as I dashed for the lee door and as I wondered why I did
+not hear the Samurai's voice.
+
+Then, as I passed the chart-room door, I saw him.
+
+He was sitting on the couch, white-faced, one sea-boot in his hands, and
+I could have sworn his hands were shaking.  That much I saw, and the next
+moment was out on deck.
+
+At first, just emerged from the light, I could see nothing, although I
+could hear men at the pin-rails and the mate snarling and shouting
+commands.  But I knew the manoeuvre.  With a weak crew, in the big, tail-
+end sea of a broken gale, breakers and destruction under her lee, the
+_Elsinore_ was being worn around.  We had been under lower-topsails and a
+reefed foresail all night.  Mr. Pike's first action, after putting the
+wheel up, had been to square the mizzen-yards.  With the wind-pressure
+thus eased aft, the stern could more easily swing against the wind while
+the wind-pressure on the for'ard-sails paid the bow off.
+
+But it takes time to wear a ship, under short canvas, in a big sea.
+Slowly, very slowly, I could feel the direction of the wind altering
+against my cheek.  The moon, dim at first, showed brighter and brighter
+as the last shreds of a flying cloud drove away from before it.  In vain
+I looked for any land.
+
+"Main-braces!--all of you!--jump!" Mr. Pike shouted, himself leading the
+rush along the poop.  And the men really rushed.  Not in all the months I
+had observed them had I seen such swiftness of energy.
+
+I made my way to the wheel, where Tom Spink stood.  He did not notice me.
+With one hand holding the idle wheel, he was leaning out to one side, his
+eyes fixed in a fascinated stare.  I followed its direction, on between
+the chart-house and the port-jigger shrouds, and on across a mountain sea
+that was very vague in the moonlight.  And then I saw it!  The
+_Elsinore's_ stern was flung skyward, and across that cold ocean I saw
+land--black rocks and snow-covered slopes and crags.  And toward this
+land the _Elsinore_, now almost before the wind, was driving.
+
+From the 'midship-house came the snarls of the mate and the cries of the
+sailors.  They were pulling and hauling for very life.  Then came Mr.
+Pike, across the poop, leaping with incredible swiftness, sending his
+snarl before him.
+
+"Ease that wheel there!  What the hell you gawkin' at?  Steady her as I
+tell you.  That's all you got to do!"
+
+From for'ard came a cry, and I knew Mr. Mellaire was on top of the
+for'ard-house and managing the fore-yards.
+
+"Now!"--from Mr. Pike.  "More spokes!  Steady!  Steady!  And be ready to
+check her!"
+
+He bounded away along the poop again, shouting for men for the mizzen-
+braces.  And the men appeared, some of his watch, others of the second
+mate's watch, routed from sleep--men coatless, and hatless, and bootless;
+men ghastly-faced with fear but eager for once to spring to the orders of
+the man who knew and could save their miserable lives from miserable
+death.  Yes--and I noted the delicate-handed cook, and Yatsuda, the sail-
+maker, pulling with his one unparalysed hand.  It was all hands to save
+ship, and all hands knew it.  Even Sundry Buyers, who had drifted aft in
+his stupidity instead of being for'ard with his own officer, forebore to
+stare about and to press his abdomen.  For the nonce he pulled like a
+youngling of twenty.
+
+The moon covered again, and it was in darkness that the _Elsinore_
+rounded up on the wind on the starboard tack.  This, in her case, under
+lower-topsails only, meant that she lay eight points from the wind, or,
+in land terms, at right angles to the wind.
+
+Mr. Pike was splendid, marvellous.  Even as the _Elsinore_ was rounding
+to on the wind, while the head-yards were still being braced, and even as
+he was watching the ship's behaviour and the wheel, in between his
+commands to Tom Spink of "A spoke!  A spoke or two!  Another!  Steady!
+Hold her!  Ease her!" he was ordering the men aloft to loose sail.  I had
+thought, the manoeuvre of wearing achieved, that we were saved, but this
+setting of all three upper-topsails unconvinced me.
+
+The moon remained hidden, and to leeward nothing could be seen.  As each
+sail was set, the _Elsinore_ was pressed farther and farther over, and I
+realized that there was plenty of wind left, despite the fact that the
+gale had broken or was breaking.  Also, under this additional canvas, I
+could feel the _Elsinore_ moving through the water.  Pike now sent the
+Maltese Cockney to help Tom Spink at the wheel.  As for himself, he took
+his stand beside the booby-hatch, where he could gauge the _Elsinore_,
+gaze to leeward, and keep his eye on the helmsmen.
+
+"Full and by," was his reiterated command.  "Keep her a good full--a rap-
+full; but don't let her fall away.  Hold her to it, and drive her."
+
+He took no notice whatever of me, although I, on my way to the lee of the
+chart-house, stood at his shoulder a full minute, offering him a chance
+to speak.  He knew I was there, for his big shoulder brushed my arm as he
+swayed and turned to warn the helmsmen in the one breath to hold her up
+to it but to keep her full.  He had neither time nor courtesy for a
+passenger in such a moment.
+
+Sheltering by the chart-house, I saw the moon appear.  It grew brighter
+and brighter, and I saw the land, dead to leeward of us, not three
+hundred yards away.  It was a cruel sight--black rock and bitter snow,
+with cliffs so perpendicular that the _Elsinore_ could have laid
+alongside of them in deep water, with great gashes and fissures, and with
+great surges thundering and spouting along all the length of it.
+
+Our predicament was now clear to me.  We had to weather the bight of land
+and islands into which we had drifted, and sea and wind worked directly
+on shore.  The only way out was to drive through the water, to drive fast
+and hard, and this was borne in upon me by Mr. Pike bounding past to the
+break of the poop, where I heard him shout to Mr. Mellaire to set the
+mainsail.
+
+Evidently the second mate was dubious, for the next cry of Mr. Pike's
+was:
+
+"Damn the reef!  You'd be in hell first!  Full mainsail!  All hands to
+it!"
+
+The difference was appreciable at once when that huge spread of canvas
+opposed the wind.  The _Elsinore_ fairly leaped and quivered as she
+sprang to it, and I could feel her eat to windward as she at the same
+time drove faster ahead.  Also, in the rolls and gusts, she was forced
+down till her lee-rail buried and the sea foamed level across to her
+hatches.  Mr. Pike watched her like a hawk, and like certain death he
+watched the Maltese Cockney and Tom Spink at the wheel.
+
+"Land on the lee bow!" came a cry from for'ard, that was carried on from
+mouth to mouth along the bridge to the poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Pike nod his head grimly and sarcastically.  He had already
+seen it from the lee-poop, and what he had not seen he had guessed.  A
+score of times I saw him test the weight of the gusts on his cheek and
+with all the brain of him study the _Elsinore's_ behaviour.  And I knew
+what was in his mind.  Could she carry what she had?  Could she carry
+more?
+
+Small wonder, in this tense passage of time, that I had forgotten the
+Samurai.  Nor did I remember him until the chart-house door swung open
+and I caught him by the arm.  He steadied and swayed beside me, while he
+watched that cruel picture of rock and snow and spouting surf.
+
+"A good full!" Mr. Pike snarled.  "Or I'll eat your heart out.  God damn
+you for the farmer's hound you are, Tom Spink!  Ease her!  Ease her!  Ease
+her into the big ones, damn you!  Don't let her head fall off!  Steady!
+Where in hell did you learn to steer?  What cow-farm was you raised on?"
+
+Here he bounded for'ard past us with those incredible leaps of his.
+
+"It would be good to set the mizzen-topgallant," I heard Captain West
+mutter in a weak, quavery voice.  "Mr. Pathurst, will you please tell Mr.
+Pike to set the mizzen-topgallant?"
+
+And at that very instant Mr. Pike's voice rang out from the break of the
+poop:
+
+"Mr. Mellaire!--the mizzen-topgallant!"
+
+Captain West's head drooped until his chin rested on his breast, and so
+low did he mutter that I leaned to hear.
+
+"A very good officer," he said.  "An excellent officer.  Mr. Pathurst, if
+you will kindly favour me, I should like to go in.  I . . . I haven't got
+on my boots."
+
+The muscular feat was to open the heavy iron door and hold it open in the
+rolls and plunges.  This I accomplished; but when I had helped Captain
+West across the high threshold he thanked me and waived further services.
+And I did not know even then he was dying.
+
+Never was a Blackwood ship driven as was the _Elsinore_ during the next
+half-hour.  The full-jib was also set, and, as it departed in shreds, the
+fore-topmast staysail was being hoisted.  For'ard of the 'midship-house
+it was made unlivable by the bursting seas.  Mr. Mellaire, with half the
+crew, clung on somehow on top the 'midship-house, while the rest of the
+crew was with us in the comparative safety of the poop.  Even Charles
+Davis, drenched and shivering, hung on beside me to the brass ring-handle
+of the chart-house door.
+
+Such sailing!  It was a madness of speed and motion, for the _Elsinore_
+drove over and through and under those huge graybeards that thundered
+shore-ward.  There were times, when rolls and gusts worked against her at
+the same moment, when I could have sworn the ends of her lower-yardarms
+swept the sea.
+
+It was one chance in ten that we could claw off.  All knew it, and all
+knew there was nothing more to do but await the issue.  And we waited in
+silence.  The only voice was that of the mate, intermittently cursing,
+threatening, and ordering Tom Spink and the Maltese Cockney at the wheel.
+Between whiles, and all the while, he gauged the gusts, and ever his eyes
+lifted to the main-topgallant-yard.  He wanted to set that one more sail.
+A dozen times I saw him half-open his mouth to give the order he dared
+not give.  And as I watched him, so all watched him.  Hard-bitten, bitter-
+natured, sour-featured and snarling-mouthed, he was the one man, the
+henchman of the race, the master of the moment.  "And where," was my
+thought, "O where was the Samurai?"
+
+One chance in ten?  It was one in a hundred as we fought to weather the
+last bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between us and
+open ocean.  So close were we that I looked to see our far-reeling
+skysail-yards strike the face of the rock.  So close were we, no more
+than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank down into the
+last great trough between two seas I can swear every one of us held
+breath and waited for the _Elsinore_ to strike.
+
+Instead we drove free.  And as if in very rage at our escape, the storm
+took that moment to deal us the mightiest buffet of all.  The mate felt
+that monster sea coming, for he sprang to the wheel ere the blow fell.  I
+looked for'ard, and I saw all for'ard blotted out by the mountain of
+water that fell aboard.  The _Elsinore_ righted from the shock and
+reappeared to the eye, full of water from rail to rail.  Then a gust
+caught her sails and heeled her over, spilling half the enormous burden
+outboard again.
+
+Along the bridge came the relayed cry of "Man overboard!"
+
+I glanced at the mate, who had just released the wheel to the helmsmen.
+He shook his head, as if irritated by so trivial a happening, walked to
+the corner of the half-wheelhouse, and stared at the coast he had
+escaped, white and black and cold in the moonlight.
+
+Mr. Mellaire came aft, and they met beside me in the lee of the chart-
+house.
+
+"All hands, Mr. Mellaire," the mate said, "and get the mainsail off of
+her.  After that, the mizzen-topgallant."
+
+"Yes, sir," said the second.
+
+"Who was it?" the mate asked, as Mr. Mellaire was turning away.
+
+"Boney--he was no good, anyway," came the answer.
+
+That was all.  Boney the Splinter was gone, and all hands were answering
+the command of Mr. Mellaire to take in the mainsail.  But they never took
+it in; for at that moment it started to blow away out of the bolt-ropes,
+and in but few moments all that was left of it was a few short, slatting
+ribbons.
+
+"Mizzen-topgallant-sail!" Mr. Pike ordered.  Then, and for the first
+time, he recognized my existence.
+
+"Well rid of it," he growled.  "It never did set properly.  I was always
+aching to get my hands on the sail-maker that made it."
+
+On my way below a glance into the chart-room gave me the cue to the
+Samurai's blunder--if blunder it can be called, for no one will ever
+know.  He lay on the floor in a loose heap, rolling willy-nilly with
+every roll of the _Elsinore_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+There is so much to write about all at once.  In the first place, Captain
+West.  Not entirely unexpected was his death.  Margaret tells me that she
+was apprehensive from the start of the voyage--and even before.  It was
+because of her apprehension that she so abruptly changed her plans and
+accompanied her father.
+
+What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that it
+was some stroke of the heart.  And yet, after the stroke, did he not come
+out on deck?  Or could the first stroke have been followed by another and
+fatal one after I had helped him inside through the door?  And even so, I
+have never heard of a heart-stroke being preceded hours before by a
+weakening of the mind.  Captain West's mind seemed quite clear, and must
+have been quite clear, that last afternoon when he wore the _Elsinore_
+and started the lee-shore drift.  In which case it was a blunder.  The
+Samurai blundered, and his heart destroyed him when he became aware of
+the blunder.
+
+At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret's head.  She
+accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the oncoming
+termination of his sickness.  And no one will ever undeceive her.  Neither
+Mr. Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention a whisper of what
+so narrowly missed causing disaster.  In fact, Mr. Pike does not talk
+about the matter at all.--And then, again, might it not have been
+something different from heart disease?  Or heart disease complicated
+with something else that obscured his mind that afternoon before his
+death?  Well, no one knows, and I, for one, shall not sit, even in secret
+judgment, on the event.
+
+* * * * *
+
+At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the _Elsinore_ was
+rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of
+miles off the land.  Captain West was buried at four o'clock, and at
+eight bells that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few remarks
+to both watches.  They were straight-from-the-shoulder remarks, or, as he
+called them, they were "brass tacks."
+
+Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss, and
+that they would toe the mark as they never had before.  Up to this time
+they had been loafing in an hotel, but from this time on they were going
+to work.
+
+"On this hooker, from now on," he perorated, "it's going to be like old
+times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as well as the first.
+And God help the man that don't jump.  That's all.  Relieve the wheel and
+lookout."
+
+* * * * *
+
+And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition.  I don't see how they
+can jump.  Another week of westerly gales, alternating with brief periods
+of calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off the Horn.  So weak
+are the men that they have no spirit left in them--not even the
+gangsters.  And so afraid are they of the mate that they really do their
+best to jump when he drives them, and he drives them all the time.  Mr.
+Mellaire shakes his head.
+
+"Wait till they get around and up into better weather," he astonished me
+by telling me the other afternoon.  "Wait till they get dried out, and
+rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more flesh on
+their bones, and more spunk in their blood--then they won't stand for
+this driving.  Mr. Pike can't realize that times have changed, sir, and
+laws have changed, and men have changed.  He's an old man, and I know
+what I am talking about."
+
+"You mean you've been listening to the talk of the men?" I challenged
+rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this ship's
+officer.
+
+The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of light
+vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching, fearful thing
+that lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to leap out at me,
+while the cruel gash of mouth drew thinner and crueller.  And at the same
+time, on my inner sight, was grotesquely limned a picture of a brain
+pulsing savagely against the veneer of skin that covered that cleft of
+skull beneath the dripping sou'-wester.  Then he controlled himself, the
+mouth-gash relaxed, and the suave and gentle film drew again across the
+eyes.
+
+"I mean, sir," he said softly, "that I am speaking out of a long sea
+experience.  Times have changed.  The old driving days are gone.  And I
+trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the matter,
+nor misinterpret what I have said."
+
+Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I could
+not ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the talk of the
+men.  And yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is a good sailorman
+and second mate save for his unholy intimacy with the men for'ard--an
+intimacy which even the Chinese cook and the Chinese steward deplore as
+unseamanlike and perilous.
+
+Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that they
+have no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest for'ard
+who will not die, and who are as spunky as ever.  They are Andy Fay,
+Mulligan Jacobs, and Charles Davis.  What strange, abysmal vitality
+informs them is beyond all speculation.  Of course, Charles Davis should
+have been overside with a sack of coal at his feet long ago.  And Andy
+Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only, and have always been, wrecked and
+emaciated wisps of men.  Yet far stronger men than they have gone over
+the side, and far stronger men than they are laid up right now in
+absolute physical helplessness in the soggy forecastle bunks.  And these
+two bitter flames of shreds of things stand all their watches and answer
+all calls for both watches.
+
+Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in them.
+Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed dripping on
+occasion by the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight through canvas
+tarpaulins, nevertheless not a chicken has died.  Is it a matter of
+selection?  Are these the iron-vigoured ones that survived the hardships
+from Baltimore to the Horn, and are fitted to survive anything?  Then for
+a De Vries to take them, save them, and out of them found the hardiest
+breed of chickens on the planet!  And after this I shall always query
+that phrase, most ancient in our language--"chicken-hearted."  Measured
+by the _Elsinore's_ chickens, it is a misnomer.
+
+Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
+topaz eyes, spunkless.  Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest of
+the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech, nevertheless they
+are good sailors and are always first to spring into any enterprise of
+work or peril.  They have gone into Mr. Mellaire's watch, and they are
+quite apart from the rest of the sailors.  And when there is a delay, or
+wait, with nothing to do for long minutes, they shoulder together, and
+stand and sway to the heave of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale,
+topaz eyes, of a country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes
+and sandy hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of
+topaz eyes and sandy hair.
+
+But the rest of the crew!  Take the Maltese Cockney.  He is too keenly
+intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure.  He is a
+shadow of his former self.  His cheeks have fallen in.  Dark circles of
+suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and English
+intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as if aflame
+with fever.
+
+Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long tried
+and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit.  He is whining and
+fearful.  So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he is
+prideless and shameless.
+
+"I'll never ship around the Horn again, sir," he began on me the other
+day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel.  "I've sworn it before,
+but this time I mean it.  Never again, sir.  Never again."
+
+"Why did you swear it before?" I queried.
+
+"It was on the _Nahoma_, sir, four years ago.  Two hundred and thirty
+days from Liverpool to 'Frisco.  Think of it, sir.  Two hundred and
+thirty days!  And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
+creosote got loose.  We buried the captain right here off the Horn.  The
+grub gave out.  Most of us nearly died of scurvy.  Every man Jack of us
+was carted to hospital in 'Frisco.  It was plain hell, sir, that's what
+it was, an' two hundred and thirty days of it."
+
+"Yet here you are," I laughed; "signed on another Horn voyage."
+
+And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
+
+"If only we'd lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney."
+
+I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered.  The
+carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with the
+winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
+eternal buffeting by the Great West Wind.  Nor are we alone in our
+travail on this desolate ocean.  Never a day does the gray thin, or the
+snow-squalls cease that we do not sight ships, west-bound like ourselves,
+hove-to and trying to hold on to the meagre westing they possess.  And
+occasionally, when the gray clears and lifts, we see a lucky ship, bound
+east, running before it and reeling off the miles.  I saw Mr. Pike,
+yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at one such craft that
+flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile away.
+
+And the men are jumping.  Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square
+fists of his, as many a man's face attests.  So weak are they, and so
+terrible is he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-handed.  I
+cannot help but note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take part in this
+driving.  Yet I know that he is a trained driver, and that he was not
+averse to driving at the outset of the voyage.  But now he seems bent on
+keeping on good terms with the crew.  I should like to know what Mr. Pike
+thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be blind to what is going on; but I
+am too well aware of what would happen if I raised the question.  He
+would insult me, snap my head off, and indulge in a three-days'
+sea-grouch.  Things are sad and monotonous enough for Margaret and me in
+the cabin and at table, without invoking the blight of the mate's
+displeasure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated.  From now on and for always
+these imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs.  We are west
+of the Diego de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at a twelve-knot
+clip with an easterly gale at our backs.  And the carpenter is gone.  His
+passing, and the coming of the easterly wind, were coincidental.
+
+It was yesterday morning, as he helped me to dress, that I was struck by
+the solemnity of Wada's face.  He shook his head lugubriously as he broke
+the news.  The carpenter was missing.  The ship had been searched for him
+high and low.  There just was no carpenter.
+
+"What does the steward think?" I asked.  "What does Louis think?--and
+Yatsuda?"
+
+"The sailors, they kill 'm carpenter sure," was the answer.  "Very bad
+ship this.  Very bad hearts.  Just the same pig, just the same dog.  All
+the time kill.  All the time kill.  Bime-by everybody kill.  You see."
+
+The old steward, at work in his pantry, grinned at me when I mentioned
+the matter.
+
+"They make fool with me, I fix 'em," he said vindictively.  "Mebbe they
+kill me, all right; but I kill some, too."
+
+He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his body,
+in a canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a meat knife of
+the heavy sort that butchers hack with.  He drew it forth--it was fully
+two feet long--and, to demonstrate its razor-edge, sliced a sheet of
+newspaper into many ribbons.
+
+"Huh!" he laughed sardonically.  "I am Chink, monkey, damn fool, eh?--no
+good, eh? all rotten damn to hell.  I fix 'em, they make fool with me."
+
+And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play.  Nobody knows
+what happened to the carpenter.  There are no clues, no traces.  The
+night was calm and snowy.  No seas broke on board.  Without doubt the
+clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and dead.  The
+question is: did he go over of his own accord, or was he put over?
+
+At eight o'clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches.  He stood
+at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the rail and
+gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath him.
+
+Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story.  They
+knew no more about it than did we--or so they averred.
+
+"I suppose you'll be chargin' next that I hove that big lummux overboard
+with me own hands," Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was questioned.  "An'
+mebbe I did, bein' that husky an' rampagin' bull-like."
+
+The mate's face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
+passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
+
+It was an unforgettable scene--the mate in the high place, the men,
+sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath.  A gentle snow drifted straight
+down through the windless air, while the _Elsinore_, with hollow thunder
+from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped
+the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs.
+And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens,
+their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots, their faces worn and sick.  And the
+three dreamers with the topaz eyes stood and swayed and dreamed together,
+incurious of setting and situation.
+
+And then it came--the hint of easterly air.  The mate noted it first.  I
+saw him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible draught.
+Then I felt it.  A minute longer he waited, until assured, when, the dead
+carpenter forgotten, he burst out with orders to the wheel and the crew.
+And the men jumped, though in their weakness the climb aloft was slow and
+toilsome; and when the gaskets were off the topgallant-sails and the men
+on deck were hoisting yards and sheeting home, those aloft were loosing
+the royals.
+
+While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced around,
+the _Elsinore_, her bow pointing to the west, began moving through the
+water before the first fair wind in a month and a half.
+
+Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time the
+snow fell steadily.  The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to fall, and
+the breeze continued to grow upon itself.  Tom Spink, passing by me on
+the poop to lend a hand at the final finicky trimming of the
+mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant look.  Superstition was vindicated.
+Events had proved him right.  Fair wind had come with the going of the
+carpenter, which said warlock had incontestably taken with him overside
+his bag of wind-tricks.
+
+Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was too
+disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself, glancing
+at the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern into the gray of
+snow out of which blew the favouring wind.  He even paused beside me to
+gossip for a moment about the French restaurants of San Francisco and
+how, therein, the delectable California fashion of cooking wild duck
+obtained.
+
+"Throw 'em through the fire," he chanted.  "That's the way--throw 'em
+through the fire--a hot oven, sixteen minutes--I take mine fourteen, to
+the second--an' squeeze the carcasses."
+
+By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a stiff
+breeze.  At three in the afternoon we were running before a growing gale.
+It was across a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting sea that made from
+eastward bucked into the West End Drift and battled and battered down the
+huge south-westerly swell.  And the big grinning dolt of a Finnish
+carpenter, already food for fish and bird, was astern there somewhere in
+the freezing rack and drive.
+
+Make westing!  We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of
+longitude at the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for
+two.  And Mr. Pike, staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore that
+they could carry away for all he cared ere he eased an inch of canvas.
+More he did.  He set the huge crojack, biggest of all sails, and
+challenged God or Satan to start a seam of it or all its seams.
+
+He simply could not go below.  In such auspicious occasions all watches
+were his, and he strode the poop perpetually with all age-lag banished
+from his legs.  Margaret and I were with him in the chart-room when he
+hurrahed the barometer, down to 28.55 and falling.  And we were near him,
+on the poop, when he drove by an east-bound lime-juicer, hove-to under
+upper-topsails.  We were a biscuit-toss away, and he sprang upon the rail
+at the jigger-shrouds and danced a war-dance and waved his free arm, and
+yelled his scorn and joy at their discomfiture to the several oilskinned
+figures on the stranger vessel's poop.
+
+Through the pitch-black night we continued to drive.  The crew was sadly
+frightened, and I sought in vain, in the two dog-watches, for Tom Spink,
+to ask him if he thought the carpenter, astern, had opened wide the bag-
+mouth and loosed all his tricks.  For the first time I saw the steward
+apprehensive.
+
+"Too much," he told me, with ominous rolling head.  "Too much sail,
+rotten bad damn all to hell.  Bime-by, pretty quick, all finish.  You
+see."
+
+"They talk about running the easting down," Mr. Pike chortled to me, as
+we clung to the poop-rail to keep from fetching away and breaking ribs
+and necks.  "Well, this is running your westing down if anybody should
+ride up in a go-devil and ask you."
+
+It was a wretched, glorious night.  Sleep was impossible--for me, at any
+rate.  Nor was there even the comfort of warmth.  Something had gone
+wrong with the big cabin stove, due to our wild running, I fancy, and the
+steward was compelled to let the fire go out.  So we are getting a taste
+of the hardship of the forecastle, though in our case everything is dry
+instead of soggy or afloat.  The kerosene stoves burned in our state
+room, but so smelly was mine that I preferred the cold.
+
+To sail on one's nerve in an over-canvassed harbour cat-boat is all the
+excitement any glutton can desire.  But to sail, in the same fashion, in
+a big ship off the Horn, is incredible and terrible.  The Great West Wind
+Drift, setting squarely into the teeth of the easterly gale, kicked up a
+tideway sea that was monstrous.  Two men toiled at the wheel, relieving
+in pairs every half-hour, and in the face of the cold they streamed with
+sweat long ere their half-hour shift was up.
+
+Mr. Pike is of the elder race of men.  His endurance is prodigious.  Watch
+and watch, and all watches, he held the poop.
+
+"I never dreamed of it," he told me, at midnight, as the great gusts tore
+by and as we listened for our lighter spars to smash aloft and crash upon
+the deck.  "I thought my last whirling sailing was past.  And here we
+are!  Here we are!
+
+"Lord!  Lord!  I sailed third mate in the little _Vampire_ before you
+were born.  Fifty-six men before the mast, and the last Jack of 'em an
+able seaman.  And there were eight boys, an' bosuns that was bosuns, an'
+sail-makers an' carpenters an' stewards an' passengers to jam the decks.
+An' three driving mates of us, an' Captain Brown, the Little Wonder.  He
+didn't weigh a hundredweight, an' he drove us--he drove _us_, three
+drivin' mates that learned from him what drivin' was.
+
+"It was knock down and drag out from the start.  The first hour of
+puttin' the men to fair perished our knuckles.  I've got the smashed
+joints yet to show.  Every sea-chest broke open, every sea-bag turned
+out, and whiskey bottles, knuckle-dusters, sling-shots, bowie-knives, an'
+guns chucked overside by the armful.  An' when we chose the watches, each
+man of fifty-six of 'em laid his knife on the main-hatch an' the
+carpenter broke the point square off.--Yes, an' the little _Vampire_ only
+eight hundred tons.  The _Elsinore_ could carry her on her deck.  But she
+was ship, all ship, an' them was men's days."
+
+Margaret, save for inability to sleep, did not mind the driving, although
+Mr. Mellaire, on the other hand, admitted apprehension.
+
+"He's got my goat," he confided to me.  "It isn't right to drive a cargo-
+carrier this way.  This isn't a ballasted yacht.  It's a coal-hulk.  I
+know what driving was, but it was in ships made to drive.  Our iron-work
+aloft won't stand it.  Mr. Pathurst, I tell you frankly that it is
+criminal, it is sheer murder, to run the _Elsinore_ with that crojack on
+her.  You can see yourself, sir.  It's an after-sail.  All its tendency
+is to throw her stern off and her bow up to it.  And if it ever happens,
+sir, if she ever gets away from the wheel for two seconds and broaches to
+. . . "
+
+"Then what?" I asked, or, rather, shouted; for all conversation had to be
+shouted close to ear in that blast of gale.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and all of him was eloquent with the
+unuttered, unmistakable word--"finish."
+
+At eight this morning Margaret and I struggled up to the poop.  And there
+was that indomitable, iron old man.  He had never left the deck all
+night.  His eyes were bright, and he appeared in the pink of well-being.
+He rubbed his hands and chuckled greeting to us, and took up his
+reminiscences.
+
+"In '51, on this same stretch, Miss West, the _Flying Cloud_, in twenty-
+four hours, logged three hundred and seventy-four miles under her
+topgallant-sails.  That was sailing.  She broke the record, that day, for
+sail an' steam."
+
+"And what are we averaging, Mr. Pike?" Margaret queried, while her eyes
+were fixed on the main deck, where continually one rail and then the
+other dipped under the ocean and filled across from rail to rail, only to
+spill out and take in on the next roll.
+
+"Thirteen for a fair average since five o'clock yesterday afternoon," he
+exulted.  "In the squalls she makes all of sixteen, which is going some,
+for the _Elsinore_."
+
+"I'd take the crojack off if I had charge," Margaret criticised.
+
+"So would I, so would I, Miss West," he replied; "if we hadn't been six
+weeks already off the Horn."
+
+She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel to
+the wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some invisible
+archer's hands.
+
+"They're remarkably good sticks of timber," was her comment.
+
+"Well may you say it, Miss West," he agreed.  "I'd never a-believed
+they'd a-stood it myself.  But just look at 'm!  Just look at 'm!"
+
+There was no breakfast for the men.  Three times the galley had been
+washed out, and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented themselves
+with hard tack and cold salt horse.  Aft, with us, the steward scalded
+himself twice ere he succeeded in making coffee over a kerosene-burner.
+
+At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the same
+direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail.  The only one of
+her courses set was the foresail.
+
+"The way that skipper's carryin' on is shocking," Mr. Pike sneered.  "He
+should be more cautious, and remember God, the owners, the underwriters,
+and the Board of Trade."
+
+Such was our speed that in almost no time we were up with the stranger
+vessel and passing her.  Mr. Pike was like a boy just loosed from school.
+He altered our course so that we passed her a hundred yards away.  She
+was a gallant sight, but, such was our speed, she appeared standing
+still.  Mr. Pike jumped upon the rail and insulted those on her poop by
+extending a rope's end in invitation to take a tow.
+
+Margaret shook her head privily to me as she gazed at our bending royal-
+yards, but was caught in the act by Mr. Pike, who cried out:
+
+"What kites she won't carry she can drag!"
+
+An hour later I caught Tom Spink, just relieved from his shift at the
+wheel and weak from exhaustion.
+
+"What do you think now of the carpenter and his bag of tricks?" I
+queried.
+
+"Lord lumme, it should a-ben the mate, sir," was his reply.
+
+By five in the afternoon we had logged 314 miles since five the previous
+day, which was two over an average of thirteen knots for twenty-four
+consecutive hours.
+
+"Now take Captain Brown of the little _Vampire_," Mr. Pike grinned to me,
+for our sailing made him good-natured.  "He never would take in until the
+kites an' stu'n'sails was about his ears.  An' when she was blown' her
+worst an' we was half-fairly shortened down, he'd turn in for a snooze,
+an' say to us, 'Call me if she moderates.'  Yes, and I'll never forget
+the night when I called him an' told him that everything on top the
+houses had gone adrift, an' that two of the boats had been swept aft and
+was kindling-wood against the break of the cabin.  'Very well, Mr. Pike,'
+he says, battin' his eyes and turnin' over to go to sleep again.  'Very
+well, Mr. Pike,' says he.  'Watch her.  An' Mr. Pike . . .'  'Yes, sir,'
+says I.  'Give me a call, Mr. Pike, when the windlass shows signs of
+comin' aft.'  That's what he said, his very words, an' the next moment,
+damme, he was snorin'."
+
+* * * * *
+
+It is now midnight, and, cunningly wedged into my bunk, unable to sleep,
+I am writing these lines with flying dabs of pencil at my pad.  And no
+more shall I write, I swear, until this gale is blown out, or we are
+blown to Kingdom Come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+The days have passed and I have broken my resolve; for here I am again
+writing while the _Elsinore_ surges along across a magnificent, smoky,
+dusty sea.  But I have two reasons for breaking my word.  First, and
+minor, we had a real dawn this morning.  The gray of the sea showed a
+streaky blue, and the cloud-masses were actually pink-tipped by a really
+and truly sun.
+
+Second, and major, _we are around the Horn_!  We are north of 50 in the
+Pacific, in Longitude 80.49, with Cape Pillar and the Straits of Magellan
+already south of east from us, and we are heading north-north-west.  _We
+are around the Horn_!  The profound significance of this can be
+appreciated only by one who has wind-jammed around from east to west.
+Blow high, blow low, nothing can happen to thwart us.  No ship north of
+50 was ever blown back.  From now on it is plain sailing, and Seattle
+suddenly seems quite near.
+
+All the ship's company, with the exception of Margaret, is better
+spirited.  She is quiet, and a little down, though she is anything but
+prone to the wastage of grief.  In her robust, vital philosophy God's
+always in heaven.  I may describe her as being merely subdued, and
+gentle, and tender.  And she is very wistful to receive gentle
+consideration and tenderness from me.  She is, after all, the genuine
+woman.  She wants the strength that man has to give, and I flatter myself
+that I am ten times a stronger man than I was when the voyage began,
+because I am a thousand times a more human man since I told the books to
+go hang and began to revel in the human maleness of the man that loves a
+woman and is loved.
+
+Returning to the ship's company.  The rounding of the Horn, the better
+weather that is continually growing better, the easement of hardship and
+toil and danger, with the promise of the tropics and of the balmy south-
+east trades before them--all these factors contribute to pick up our men
+again.  The temperature has already so moderated that the men are
+beginning to shed their surplusage of clothing, and they no longer wrap
+sacking about their sea-boots.  Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I
+heard a man actually singing.
+
+The steward has discarded the huge, hacking knife and relaxed to the
+extent of engaging in an occasional sober romp with Possum.  Wada's face
+is no longer solemnly long, and Louis' Oxford accent is more mellifluous
+than ever.  Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay are the same venomous scorpions
+they have always been.  The three gangsters, with the clique they lead,
+have again asserted their tyrrany and thrashed all the weaklings and
+feeblings in the forecastle.  Charles Davis resolutely refuses to die,
+though how he survived that wet and freezing room of iron through all the
+weeks off the Horn has elicited wonder even from Mr. Pike, who has a most
+accurate knowledge of what men can stand and what they cannot stand.
+
+How Nietzsche, with his eternal slogan of "Be hard!  Be hard!" would have
+delighted in Mr. Pike!
+
+And--oh!--Larry has had a tooth removed.  For some days distressed with a
+jumping toothache, he came aft to the mate for relief.  Mr. Pike refused
+to "monkey" with the "fangled" forceps in the medicine-chest.  He used a
+tenpenny nail and a hammer in the good old way to which he was brought
+up.  I vouch for this.  I saw it done.  One blow of the hammer and the
+tooth was out, while Larry was jumping around holding his jaw.  It is a
+wonder it wasn't fractured.  But Mr. Pike avers he has removed hundreds
+of teeth by this method and never known a fractured jaw.  Also, he avers
+he once sailed with a skipper who shaved every Sunday morning and never
+touched a razor, nor any cutting-edge, to his face.  What he used,
+according to Mr. Pike, was a lighted candle and a damp towel.  Another
+candidate for Nietzsche's immortals who are hard!
+
+As for Mr. Pike himself, he is the highest-spirited, best-conditioned man
+on board.  The driving to which he subjected the _Elsinore_ was meat and
+drink.  He still rubs his hands and chuckles over the memory of it.
+
+"Huh!" he said to me, in reference to the crew; "I gave 'em a taste of
+real old-fashioned sailing.  They'll never forget this hooker--at least
+them that don't take a sack of coal overside before we reach port."
+
+"You mean you think we'll have more sea-burials?" I inquired.
+
+He turned squarely upon me, and squarely looked me in the eyes for the
+matter of five long seconds.
+
+"Huh!" he replied, as he turned on his heel.  "Hell ain't begun to pop on
+this hooker."
+
+He still stands his mate's watch, alternating with Mr. Mellaire, for he
+is firm in his conviction that there is no man for'ard fit to stand a
+second mate's watch.  Also, he has kept his old quarters.  Perhaps it is
+out of delicacy for Margaret; for I have learned that it is the
+invariable custom for the mate to occupy the captain's quarters when the
+latter dies.  So Mr. Mellaire still eats by himself in the big
+after-room, as he has done since the loss of the carpenter, and bunks as
+before in the 'midship-house with Nancy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+Mr. Mellaire was right.  The men would not accept the driving when the
+_Elsinore_ won to easier latitudes.  Mr. Pike was right.  Hell had not
+begun to pop.  But it has popped now, and men are overboard without even
+the kindliness of a sack of coal at their feet.  And yet the men, though
+ripe for it, did not precipitate the trouble.  It was Mr. Mellaire.  Or,
+rather, it was Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian.  Perhaps it was
+Possum.  At any rate, it was an accident, in which the several-named,
+including Possum, played their respective parts.
+
+To begin at the beginning.  Two weeks have elapsed since we crossed 50,
+and we are now in 37--the same latitude as San Francisco, or, to be
+correct, we are as far south of the equator as San Francisco is north of
+it.  The trouble was precipitated yesterday morning shortly after nine
+o'clock, and Possum started the chain of events that culminated in
+downright mutiny.  It was Mr. Mellaire's watch, and he was standing on
+the bridge, directly under the mizzen-top, giving orders to Sundry
+Buyers, who, with Arthur Deacon and the Maltese Cockney, was doing
+rigging work aloft.
+
+Get the picture and the situation in all its ridiculousness.  Mr. Pike,
+thermometer in hand, was coming back along the bridge from taking the
+temperature of the coal in the for'ard hold.  Ditman Olansen was just
+swinging into the mizzen-top as he went up with several turns of rope
+over one shoulder.  Also, in some way, to the end of this rope was
+fastened a sizable block that might have weighed ten pounds.  Possum,
+running free, was fooling around the chicken-coop on top the 'midship-
+house.  And the chickens, featherless but indomitable, were enjoying the
+milder weather as they pecked at the grain and grits which the steward
+had just placed in their feeding-trough.  The tarpaulin that covered
+their pen had been off for several days.
+
+Now observe.  I am at the break of the poop, leaning on the rail and
+watching Ditman Olansen swing into the top with his cumbersome burden.
+Mr. Pike, proceeding aft, has just passed Mr. Mellaire.  Possum, who, on
+account of the Horn weather and the tarpaulin, has not seen the chickens
+for many weeks, is getting reacquainted, and is investigating them with
+that keen nose of his.  And a hen's beak, equally though differently
+keen, impacts on Possum's nose, which is as sensitive as it is keen.
+
+I may well say, now that I think it over, that it was this particular hen
+that started the mutiny.  The men, well-driven by Mr. Pike, were ripe for
+an explosion, and Possum and the hen laid the train.
+
+Possum fell away backwards from the coop and loosed a wild cry of pain
+and indignation.  This attracted Ditman Olansen's attention.  He paused
+and craned his neck out in order to see, and, in this moment of
+carelessness, the block he was carrying fetched away from him along with
+the several turns of rope around his shoulder.  Both the mates sprang
+away to get out from under.  The rope, fast to the block and following
+it, lashed about like a blacksnake, and, though the block fell clear of
+Mr. Mellaire, the bight of the rope snatched off his cap.
+
+Mr. Pike had already started an oath aloft when his eyes caught sight of
+the terrible cleft in Mr. Mellaire's head.  There it was, for all the
+world to read, and Mr. Pike's and mine were the only eyes that could read
+it.  The sparse hair upon the second mate's crown served not at all to
+hide the cleft.  It began out of sight in the thicker hair above the
+ears, and was exposed nakedly across the whole dome of head.
+
+The stream of abuse for Ditman Olansen was choked in Mr. Pike's throat.
+All he was capable of for the moment was to stare, petrified, at that
+enormous fissure flanked at either end with a thatch of grizzled hair.  He
+was in a dream, a trance, his great hands knotting and clenching
+unconsciously as he stared at the mark unmistakable by which he had said
+that he would some day identify the murderer of Captain Somers.  And in
+that moment I remembered having heard him declare that some day he would
+stick his fingers in that mark.
+
+Still as in a dream, moving slowly, right hand outstretched like a talon,
+with the fingers drawn downward, he advanced on the second mate with the
+evident intention of thrusting his fingers into that cleft and of clawing
+and tearing at the brain-life beneath that pulsed under the thin film of
+skin.
+
+The second mate backed away along the bridge, and Mr. Pike seemed
+partially to come to himself.  His outstretched arm dropped to his side,
+and he paused.
+
+"I know you," he said, in a strange, shaky voice, blended of age and
+passion.  "Eighteen years ago you were dismasted off the Plate in the
+_Cyrus Thompson_.  She foundered, after you were on your beam ends and
+lost your sticks.  You were in the only boat that was saved.  Eleven
+years ago, on the _Jason Harrison_, in San Francisco, Captain Somers was
+beaten to death by his second mate.  This second mate was a survivor of
+the _Cyrus Thompson_.  This second mate'd had his skull split by a crazy
+sea-cook.  Your skull is split.  This second mate's name was Sidney
+Waltham.  And if you ain't Sidney Waltham . . . "
+
+At this point Mr. Mellaire, or, rather, Sidney Waltham, despite his fifty
+years, did what only a sailor could do.  He went over the bridge-rail
+side-wise, caught the running gear up-and-down the mizzen-mast, and
+landed lightly on his feet on top of Number Three hatch.  Nor did he stop
+there.  He ran across the hatch and dived through the doorway of his room
+in the 'midship-house.
+
+Such must have been Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused like
+a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and
+seemed to awaken.
+
+But the second mate had not run to his room for refuge.  The next moment
+he emerged, a thirty-two Smith and Wesson in his hand, and the instant he
+emerged he began shooting.
+
+Mr. Pike was wholly himself again, and I saw him perceptibly pause and
+decide between the two impulses that tore at him.  One was to leap over
+the bridge-rail and down at the man who shot at him; the other was to
+retreat.  He retreated.  And as he bounded aft along the narrow bridge
+the mutiny began.  Arthur Deacon, from the mizzen-top, leaned out and
+hurled a steel marlin-spike at the fleeing mate.  The thing flashed in
+the sunlight as it hurtled down.  It missed Mr. Pike by twenty feet and
+nearly impaled Possum, who, afraid of firearms, was wildly rushing and ki-
+yi-ing aft.  It so happened that the sharp point of the marlin-spike
+struck the wooden floor of the bridge, and it penetrated the planking
+with such force that after it had fetched to a standstill it vibrated
+violently for long seconds.
+
+I confess that I failed to observe a tithe of what occurred during the
+next several minutes.  Piece together as I will, after the event, I know
+that I missed much of what took place.  I know that the men aloft in the
+mizzen descended to the deck, but I never saw them descend.  I know that
+the second mate emptied the chambers of his revolver, but I did not hear
+all the shots.  I know that Lars Johnson left the wheel, and on his
+broken leg, rebroken and not yet really mended, limped and scuttled
+across the poop, down the ladder, and gained for'ard.  I know he must
+have limped and scuttled on that bad leg of his; I know that I must have
+seen him; and yet I swear that I have no impression of seeing him.
+
+I do know that I heard the rush of feet of men from for'ard along the
+main deck.  And I do know that I saw Mr. Pike take shelter behind the
+steel jiggermast.  Also, as the second mate manoeuvred to port on top of
+Number Three hatch for his last shot, I know that I saw Mr. Pike duck
+around the corner of the chart-house to starboard and get away aft and
+below by way of the booby-hatch.  And I did hear that last futile shot,
+and the bullet also as it ricochetted from the corner of the steel-walled
+chart-house.
+
+As for myself, I did not move.  I was too interested in seeing.  It may
+have been due to lack of presence of mind, or to lack of habituation to
+an active part in scenes of quick action; but at any rate I merely
+retained my position at the break of the poop and looked on.  I was the
+only person on the poop when the mutineers, led by the second mate and
+the gangsters, rushed it.  I saw them swarm up the ladder, and it never
+entered my head to attempt to oppose them.  Which was just as well, for I
+would have been killed for my pains, and I could never have stopped them.
+
+I was alone on the poop, and the men were quite perplexed to find no
+enemy in sight.  As Bert Rhine went past, he half fetched up in his
+stride, as if to knife me with the sheath knife, sharp-pointed, which he
+carried in his right hand; then, and I know I correctly measured the
+drift of his judgment, he unflatteringly dismissed me as unimportant and
+ran on.
+
+Right here I was impressed by the lack of clear-thinking on any of their
+parts.  So spontaneously had the ship's company exploded into mutiny that
+it was dazed and confused even while it acted.  For instance, in the
+months since we left Baltimore there had never been a moment, day or
+night, even when preventer tackles were rigged, that a man had not stood
+at the wheel.  So habituated were they to this, that they were shocked
+into consternation at sight of the deserted wheel.  They paused for an
+instant to stare at it.  Then Bert Rhine, with a quick word and gesture,
+sent the Italian, Guido Bombini, around the rear of the half-wheelhouse.
+The fact that he completed the circuit was proof that nobody was there.
+
+Again, in the swift rush of events, I must confess that I saw but little.
+I was aware that more of the men were climbing up the ladder and gaining
+the poop, but I had no eyes for them.  I was watching that sanguinary
+group aft near the wheel and noting the most important thing, namely,
+that it was Bert Rhine, the gangster, and not the second mate, who gave
+orders and was obeyed.
+
+He motioned to the Jew, Isaac Chantz, who had been wounded earlier in the
+voyage by O'Sullivan, and Chantz led the way to the starboard chart-house
+door.  While this was going on, all in flashing fractions of seconds,
+Bert Rhine was cautiously inspecting the lazarette through the open booby-
+hatch.
+
+Isaac Chantz jerked open the chart-house door, which swung outward.
+Things did happen so swiftly!  As he jerked the iron door open a two-foot
+hacking butcher knife, at the end of a withered, yellow hand, flashed out
+and down on him.  It missed head and neck, but caught him on top of the
+left shoulder.
+
+All hands recoiled before this, and the Jew reeled across to the rail,
+his right hand clutching at his wound, and between the fingers I could
+see the blood welling darkly.  Bert Rhine abandoned his inspection of the
+booby-hatch, and, with the second mate, the latter still carrying his
+empty Smith & Wesson, sprang into the press about the chart-house door.
+
+O wise, clever, cautious, old Chinese steward!  He made no emergence.  The
+door swung emptily back and forth to the rolling of the _Elsinore_, and
+no man knew but what, just inside, with that heavy, hacking knife
+upraised, lurked the steward.  And while they hesitated and stared at the
+aperture that alternately closed and opened with the swinging of the
+door, the booby-hatch, situated between chart-house and wheel, erupted.
+It was Mr. Pike, with his .44 automatic Colt.
+
+There were shots fired, other than by him.  I know I heard them, like
+"red-heads" at an old-time Fourth of July; but I do not know who
+discharged them.  All was mess and confusion.  Many shots were being
+fired, and through the uproar I heard the reiterant, monotonous
+explosions from the Colt's .44
+
+I saw the Italian, Mike Cipriani, clutch savagely at his abdomen and sink
+slowly to the deck.  Shorty, the Japanese half-caste, clown that he was,
+dancing and grinning on the outskirts of the struggle, with a final
+grimace and hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop and down
+the poop-ladder.  Never had I seen a finer exemplification of mob
+psychology.  Shorty, the most unstable-minded of the individuals who
+composed this mob, by his own instability precipitated the retreat in
+which the mob joined.  When he broke before the steady discharge of the
+automatic in the hand of the mate, on the instant the rest broke with
+him.  Least-balanced, his balance was the balance of all of them.
+
+Chantz, bleeding prodigiously, was one of the first on Shorty's heels.  I
+saw Nosey Murphy pause long enough to throw his knife at the mate.  The
+missile went wide, with a metallic clang struck the brass tip of one of
+the spokes of the _Elsinore's_ wheel, and clattered on the deck.  The
+second mate, with his empty revolver, and Bert Rhine with his
+sheath-knife, fled past me side by side.
+
+Mr. Pike emerged from the booby-hatch and with an unaimed shot brought
+down Bill Quigley, one of the "bricklayers," who fell at my feet.  The
+last man off the poop was the Maltese Cockney, and at the top of the
+ladder he paused to look back at Mr. Pike, who, holding the automatic in
+both hands, was taking careful aim.  The Maltese Cockney, disdaining the
+ladder, leaped through the air to the main deck.  But the Colt merely
+clicked.  It was the last bullet in it that had fetched down Bill
+Quigley.
+
+And the poop was ours.
+
+Events still crowded so closely that I missed much.  I saw the steward,
+belligerent and cautious, his long knife poised for a slash, emerge from
+the chart-house.  Margaret followed him, and behind her came Wada, who
+carried my .22 Winchester automatic rifle.  As he told me afterwards, he
+had brought it up under instructions from her.
+
+Mr. Pike was glancing with cool haste at his Colt to see whether it was
+jammed or empty, when Margaret asked him the course.
+
+"By the wind," he shouted to her, as he bounded for'ard.  "Put your helm
+hard up or we'll be all aback."
+
+Ah!--yeoman and henchman of the race, he could not fail in his fidelity
+to the ship under his command.  The iron of all his years of iron
+training was there manifest.  While mutiny spread red, and death was on
+the wing, he could not forget his charge, the ship, the _Elsinore_, the
+insensate fabric compounded of steel and hemp and woven cotton that was
+to him glorious with personality.
+
+Margaret waved Wada in my direction as she ran to the wheel.  As Mr. Pike
+passed the corner of the chart-house, simultaneously there was a report
+from amidships and the ping of a bullet against the steel wall.  I saw
+the man who fired the shot.  It was the cowboy, Steve Roberts.
+
+As for the mate, he ducked in behind the sheltering jiggermast, and even
+as he ducked his left hand dipped into his side coat-pocket, so that when
+he had gained shelter it was coming out with a fresh clip of cartridges.
+The empty clip fell to the deck, the loader clip slipped up the hollow
+butt, and he was good for eight more shots.
+
+Wada turned the little automatic rifle over to me, where I still stood
+under the weather cloth at the break of the poop.
+
+"All ready," he said.  "You take off safety."
+
+"Get Roberts," Mr. Pike called to me.  "He's the best shot for'ard.  If
+you can't get 'm, jolt the fear of God into him anyway."
+
+It was the first time I had a human target, and let me say, here and now,
+that I am convinced I am immune to buck fever.  There he was before me,
+less than a hundred feet distant, in the gangway between the door to
+Davis' room and the starboard-rail, manoeuvring for another shot at Mr.
+Pike.
+
+I must have missed Steve Roberts that first time, but I came so near him
+that he jumped.  The next instant he had located me and turned his
+revolver on me.  But he had no chance.  My little automatic was
+discharging as fast as I could tickle the trigger with my fore-finger.
+The cowboy's first shot went wild of me, because my bullet arrived ere he
+got his swift aim.  He swayed and stumbled backward, but the bullets--ten
+of them--poured from the muzzle of my Winchester like water from a garden
+hose.  It was a stream of lead I played upon him.  I shall never know how
+many times I hit him, but I am confident that after he had begun his long
+staggering fall at least three additional bullets entered him ere he
+impacted on the deck.  And even as he was falling, aimlessly and
+mechanically, stricken then with death, he managed twice again to
+discharge his weapon.
+
+And after he struck the deck he never moved.  I do believe he died in the
+air.
+
+As I held up my gun and gazed at the abruptly-deserted main-deck I was
+aware of Wada's touch on my arm.  I looked.  In his hand were a dozen
+little .22 long, soft-nosed, smokeless cartridges.  He wanted me to
+reload.  I threw on the safety, opened the magazine, and tilted the rifle
+so that he could let the fresh cartridges of themselves slide into place.
+
+"Get some more," I told him.
+
+Scarcely had he departed on the errand when Bill Quigley, who lay at my
+feet, created a diversion.  I jumped--yes, and I freely confess that I
+yelled--with startle and surprise, when I felt his paws clutch my ankles
+and his teeth shut down on the calf of my leg.
+
+It was Mr. Pike to the rescue.  I understand now the Western hyperbole of
+"hitting the high places."  The mate did not seem in contact with the
+deck.  My impression was that he soared through the air to me, landing
+beside me, and, in the instant of landing, kicking out with one of those
+big feet of his.  Bill Quigley was kicked clear away from me, and the
+next moment he was flying overboard.  It was a clean throw.  He never
+touched the rail.
+
+Whether Mike Cipriani, who, till then, had lain in a welter, began
+crawling aft in quest of safety, or whether he intended harm to Margaret
+at the wheel, we shall never know; for there was no opportunity given him
+to show his purpose.  As swiftly as Mr. Pike could cross the deck with
+those giant bounds, just that swiftly was the Italian in the air and
+following Bill Quigley overside.
+
+The mate missed nothing with those eagle eyes of his as he returned along
+the poop.  Nobody was to be seen on the main deck.  Even the lookout had
+deserted the forecastle-head, and the _Elsinore_, steered by Margaret,
+slipped a lazy two knots through the quiet sea.  Mr. Pike was
+apprehensive of a shot from ambush, and it was not until after a scrutiny
+of several minutes that he put his pistol into his side coat-pocket and
+snarled for'ard:
+
+"Come out, you rats!  Show your ugly faces!  I want to talk with you!"
+
+Guido Bombini, gesticulating peaceable intentions and evidently thrust
+out by Bert Rhine, was the first to appear.  When it was observed that
+Mr. Pike did not fire, the rest began to dribble into view.  This
+continued till all were there save the cook, the two sail-makers, and the
+second mate.  The last to come out were Tom Spink, the boy Buckwheat, and
+Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured but simple-minded German; and these
+three came out only after repeated threats from Bert Rhine, who, with
+Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist, was patently in charge.  Also, like a
+faithful dog, Guido Bombini fawned close to him.
+
+"That will do--stop where you are," Mr. Pike commanded, when the crew was
+scattered abreast, to starboard and to port, of Number Three hatch.
+
+It was a striking scene.  _Mutiny on the high seas_!  That phrase,
+learned in boyhood from my Marryatt and Cooper, recrudesced in my brain.
+This was it--mutiny on the high seas in the year nineteen thirteen--and I
+was part of it, a perishing blond whose lot was cast with the perishing
+but lordly blonds, and I had already killed a man.
+
+Mr. Pike, in the high place, aged and indomitable; leaned his arm on the
+rail at the break of the poop and gazed down at the mutineers, the like
+of which I'll wager had never been assembled in mutiny before.  There
+were the three gangsters and ex-jailbirds, anything but seamen, yet in
+control of this affair that was peculiarly an affair of the sea.  With
+them was the Italian hound, Bombini, and beside them were such strangely
+assorted men as Anton Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, Frank Fitzgibbon, and
+Richard Giller--also Arthur Deacon the white slaver, John Hackey the San
+Francisco hoodlum, the Maltese Cockney, and Tony the suicidal Greek.
+
+I noticed the three strange ones, shouldering together and standing apart
+from the others as they swayed to the lazy roll and dreamed with their
+pale, topaz eyes.  And there was the Faun, stone deaf but observant,
+straining to understand what was taking place.  Yes, and Mulligan Jacobs
+and Andy Fay were bitterly and eagerly side by side, and Ditman Olansen,
+crank-eyed, as if drawn by some affinity of bitterness, stood behind
+them, his head appearing between their heads.  Farthest advanced of all
+was Charles Davis, the man who by all rights should long since be dead,
+his face with its wax-like pallor startlingly in contrast to the
+weathered faces of the rest.
+
+I glanced back at Margaret, who was coolly steering, and she smiled to
+me, and love was in her eyes--she, too, of the perishing and lordly race
+of blonds, her place the high place, her heritage government and command
+and mastery over the stupid lowly of her kind and over the ruck and spawn
+of the dark-pigmented breeds.
+
+"Where's Sidney Waltham?" the mate snarled.  "I want him.  Bring him out.
+After that, the rest of you filth get back to work, or God have mercy on
+you."
+
+The men moved about restlessly, shuffling their feet on the deck.
+
+"Sidney Waltham, I want you--come out!" Mr. Pike called, addressing
+himself beyond them to the murderer of the captain under whom once he had
+sailed.
+
+The prodigious old hero!  It never entered his head that he was not the
+master of the rabble there below him.  He had but one idea, an idea of
+passion, and that was his desire for vengeance on the murderer of his old
+skipper.
+
+"You old stiff!" Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.
+
+"Shut up, Mulligan!" was Bert Rhine's command, in receipt of which he
+received a venomous stare from the cripple.
+
+"Oh, ho, my hearty," Mr. Pike sneered at the gangster.  "I'll take care
+of your case, never fear.  In the meantime, and right now, fetch out that
+dog."
+
+Whereupon he ignored the leader of the mutineers and began calling,
+"Waltham, you dog, come out!  Come out, you sneaking cur!  Come out!"
+
+_Another lunatic_, was the thought that flashed through my mind; another
+lunatic, the slave of a single idea.  He forgets the mutiny, his fidelity
+to the ship, in his personal thirst for vengeance.
+
+But did he?  Even as he forgot and called his heart's desire, which was
+the life of the second mate, even then, without intention, mechanically,
+his sailor's considerative eye lifted to note the draw of the sails and
+roved from sail to sail.  Thereupon, so reminded, he returned to his
+fidelity.
+
+"Well?" he snarled at Bert Rhine.  "Go on and get for'ard before I spit
+on you, you scum and slum.  I'll give you and the rest of the rats two
+minutes to return to duty."
+
+And the leader, with his two fellow-gangsters, laughed their weird,
+silent laughter.
+
+"I guess you'll listen to our talk, first, old horse," Bert Rhine
+retorted.  "--Davis, get up now and show what kind of a spieler you are.
+Don't get cold feet.  Spit it out to Foxy Grandpa an' tell 'm what's
+doin'."
+
+"You damned sea-lawyer!" Mr. Pike snarled as Davis opened his mouth to
+speak.
+
+Bert Rhine shrugged his shoulders, and half turned on his heel as if to
+depart, as he said quietly:
+
+"Oh, well, if you don't want to talk . . . "
+
+Mr. Pike conceded a point.
+
+"Go on!" he snarled.  "Spit the dirt out of your system, Davis; but
+remember one thing: you'll pay for this, and you'll pay through the nose.
+Go on!"
+
+The sea-lawyer cleared his throat in preparation.
+
+"First of all, I ain't got no part in this," he began.
+
+"I'm a sick man, an' I oughta be in my bunk right now.  I ain't fit to be
+on my feet.  But they've asked me to advise 'em on the law, an' I have
+advised 'em--"
+
+"And the law--what is it?" Mr. Pike broke in.
+
+But Davis was uncowed.
+
+"The law is that when the officers is inefficient, the crew can take
+charge peaceably an' bring the ship into port.  It's all law an' in the
+records.  There was the _Abyssinia_, in eighteen ninety-two, when the
+master'd died of fever and the mates took to drinkin'--"
+
+"Go on!" Mr. Pike shut him off.  "I don't want your citations.  What d'ye
+want?  Spit it out."
+
+"Well--and I'm talkin' as an outsider, as a sick man off duty that's been
+asked to talk--well, the point is our skipper was a good one, but he's
+gone.  Our mate is violent, seekin' the life of the second mate.  We
+don't care about that.  What we want is to get into port with our lives.
+An' our lives is in danger.  We ain't hurt nobody.  You've done all the
+bloodshed.  You've shot an' killed an' thrown two men overboard, as
+witnesses'll testify to in court.  An' there's Roberts, there, dead, too,
+an' headin' for the sharks--an' what for?  For defendin' himself from
+murderous an' deadly attack, as every man can testify an' tell the truth,
+the whole truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help 'm, God--ain't that
+right, men?"
+
+A confused murmur of assent arose from many of them.
+
+"You want my job, eh?" Mr. Pike grinned.  "An' what are you goin' to do
+with me?"
+
+"You'll be taken care of until we get in an' turn you over to the lawful
+authorities," Davis answered promptly.  "Most likely you can plead
+insanity an' get off easy."
+
+At this moment I felt a stir at my shoulder.  It was Margaret, armed with
+the long knife of the steward, whom she had put at the wheel.
+
+"You've got another guess comin', Davis," Mr. Pike said.  "I've got no
+more talk with you.  I'm goin' to talk to the bunch.  I'll give you
+fellows just two minutes to choose, and I'll tell you your choices.
+You've only got two choices.  You'll turn the second mate over to me an'
+go back to duty and take what's comin' to you, or you'll go to jail with
+the stripes on you for long sentences.  You've got two minutes.  The
+fellows that want jail can stand right where they are.  The fellows that
+don't want jail and are willin' to work faithful, can walk right back to
+me here on the poop.  Two minutes, an' you can keep your jaws stopped
+while you think over what it's goin' to be."
+
+He turned his head to me and said in an undertone, "Be ready with that
+pop-gun for trouble.  An' don't hesitate.  Slap it into 'em--the swine
+that think they can put as raw a deal as this over on us."
+
+It was Buckwheat who made the first move; but so tentative was it that it
+got no farther than a tensing of the legs and a sway forward of the
+shoulders.  Nevertheless it was sufficient to start Herman Lunkenheimer,
+who thrust out his foot and began confidently to walk aft.  Kid Twist
+gained him in a single spring, and Kid Twist, his wrist under the
+German's throat from behind; his knee pressed into the German's back,
+bent the man backward and held him.  Even as the rifle came to my
+shoulder, the hound Bombini drew his knife directly beneath Kid Twist's
+wrist across the up-stretched throat of the man.
+
+It was at this instant that I heard Mr. Pike's "Plug him!" and pulled the
+trigger; and of all ungodly things the bullet missed and caught the Faun,
+who staggered back, sat down on the hatch, and began to cough.  And even
+as he coughed he still strained with pain-eloquent eyes to try to
+understand.
+
+No other man moved.  Herman Lunkenheimer, released by Kid Twist, sank
+down on the deck.  Nor did I shoot again.  Kid Twist stood again by the
+side of Bert Rhine and Guido Bombini fawned near.
+
+Bert Rhine actually visibly smiled.
+
+"Any more of you guys want to promenade aft?" he queried in velvet tones.
+
+"Two minutes up," Mr. Pike declared.
+
+"An' what are you goin' to do about it, Grandpa?" Bert Rhine sneered.
+
+In a flash the big automatic was out of the mate's pocket and he was
+shooting as fast as he could pull trigger, while all hands fled to
+shelter.  But, as he had long since told me, he was no shot and could
+effectively use the weapon only at close range--muzzle to stomach
+preferably.
+
+As we stared at the main deck, deserted save for the dead cowboy on his
+back and for the Faun who still sat on the hatch and coughed, an eruption
+of men occurred over the for'ard edge of the 'midship-house.
+
+"Shoot!" Margaret cried at my back.
+
+"Don't!" Mr. Pike roared at me.
+
+The rifle was at my shoulder when I desisted.  Louis, the cook, led the
+rush aft to us across the top of the house and along the bridge.  Behind
+him, in single file and not wasting any time, came the Japanese
+sail-makers, Henry the training-ship boy, and the other boy Buckwheat.
+Tom Spink brought up the rear.  As he came up the ladder of the 'midship-
+house somebody from beneath must have caught him by a leg in an effort to
+drag him back.  We saw half of him in sight and knew that he was
+struggling and kicking.  He fetched clear abruptly, gained the top of the
+house in a surge, and raced aft along the bridge until he overtook and
+collided with Buckwheat, who yelled out in fear that a mutineer had
+caught him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+We who are aft, besieged in the high place, are stronger in numbers than
+I dreamed until now, when I have just finished taking the ship's census.
+Of course Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself are apart.  We alone represent
+the ruling class.  With us are servants and serfs, faithful to their
+salt, who look to us for guidance and life.
+
+I use my words advisedly.  Tom Spink and Buckwheat are serfs and nothing
+else.  Henry, the training-ship boy, occupies an anomalous
+classification.  He is of our kind, but he can scarcely be called even a
+cadet of our kind.  He will some day win to us and become a mate or a
+captain, but in the meantime, of course, his past is against him.  He is
+a candidate, rising from the serf class to our class.  Also, he is only a
+youth, the iron of his heredity not yet tested and proven.
+
+Wada, Louis, and the steward are servants of Asiatic breed.  So are the
+two Japanese sail-makers--scarcely servants, not to be called slaves, but
+something in between.
+
+So, all told, there are eleven of us aft in the citadel.  But our
+followers are too servant-like and serf-like to be offensive fighters.
+They will help us defend the high place against all attack; but they are
+incapable of joining with us in an attack on the other end of the ship.
+They will fight like cornered rats to preserve their lives; but they will
+not advance like tigers upon the enemy.  Tom Spink is faithful but spirit-
+broken.  Buckwheat is hopelessly of the stupid lowly.  Henry has not yet
+won his spurs.  On our side remain Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself.  The
+rest will hold the wall of the poop and fight thereon to the death, but
+they are not to be depended upon in a sortie.
+
+At the other end of the ship--and I may as well give the roster, are: the
+second mate, either to be called Mellaire or Waltham, a strong man of our
+own breed but a renegade; the three gangsters, killers and jackals, Bert
+Rhine, Nosey Murphy, and Kid Twist; the Maltese Cockney and Tony the
+crazy Greek; Frank Fitzgibbon and Richard Giller, the survivors of the
+trio of "bricklayers"; Anton Sorensen and Lars Jacobsen, stupid
+Scandinavian sailor-men; Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Berserk; John
+Hackey and Arthur Deacon, respectively hoodlum and white slaver; Shorty,
+the mixed-breed clown; Guido Bombini, the Italian hound; Andy Pay and
+Mulligan Jacobs, the bitter ones; the three topaz-eyed dreamers, who are
+unclassifiable; Isaac Chantz, the wounded Jew; Bob, the overgrown dolt;
+the feeble-minded Faun, lung-wounded; Nancy and Sundry Buyers, the two
+hopeless, helpless bosuns; and, finally, the sea-lawyer, Charles Davis.
+
+This makes twenty-seven of them against the eleven of us.  But there are
+men, strong in viciousness, among them.  They, too, have their serfs and
+bravos.  Guido Bombini and Isaac Chantz are certainly bravos.  And
+weaklings like Sorensen, and Jacobsen, and Bob, cannot be anything else
+than slaves to the men who compose the gangster clique.
+
+I failed to tell what happened yesterday, after Mr. Pike emptied his
+automatic and cleared the deck.  The poop was indubitably ours, and there
+was no possibility of the mutineers making a charge on us in broad
+daylight.  Margaret had gone below, accompanied by Wada, to see to the
+security of the port and starboard doors that open from the cabin
+directly on the main deck.  These are still caulked and tight and
+fastened on the inside, as they have been since the passage of Cape Horn
+began.
+
+Mr. Pike put one of the sail-makers at the wheel, and the steward,
+relieved and starting below, was attracted to the port quarter, where the
+patent log that towed astern was made fast.  Margaret had returned his
+knife to him, and he was carrying it in his hand when his attention was
+attracted astern to our wake.  Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley had managed
+to catch the lazily moving log-line and were clinging to it.  The
+_Elsinore_ was moving just fast enough to keep them on the surface
+instead of dragging them under.  Above them and about them circled
+curious and hungry albatrosses, Cape hens, and mollyhawks.  Even as I
+glimpsed the situation one of the big birds, a ten-footer at least, with
+a ten-inch beak to the fore, dropped down on the Italian.  Releasing his
+hold with one hand, he struck with his knife at the bird.  Feathers flew,
+and the albatross, deflected by the blow, fell clumsily into the water.
+
+Quite methodically, just as part of the day's work, the steward chopped
+down with his knife, catching the log-line between the steel edge and the
+rail.  At once, no longer buoyed up by the _Elsinore's_ two-knot drag
+ahead, the wounded men began to swim and flounder.  The circling hosts of
+huge sea-birds descended upon them, with carnivorous beaks striking at
+their heads and shoulders and arms.  A great screeching and squawking
+arose from the winged things of prey as they strove for the living meat.
+And yet, somehow, I was not very profoundly shocked.  These were the men
+whom I had seen eviscerate the shark and toss it overboard, and shout
+with joy as they watched it devoured alive by its brethren.  They had
+played a violent, cruel game with the things of life, and the things of
+life now played upon them the same violent, cruel game.  As they that
+rise by the sword perish by the sword, just so did these two men who had
+lived cruelly die cruelly.
+
+"Oh, well," was Mr. Pike's comment, "we've saved two sacks of mighty good
+coal."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Certainly our situation might be worse.  We are cooking on the coal-stove
+and on the oil-burners.  We have servants to cook and serve for us.  And,
+most important of all, we are in possession of all the food on the
+_Elsinore_.
+
+Mr. Pike makes no mistake.  Realizing that with our crowd we cannot rush
+the crowd at the other end of the ship, he accepts the siege, which, as
+he says, consists of the besieged holding all food supplies while the
+besiegers are on the imminent edge of famine.
+
+"Starve the dogs," he growls.  "Starve 'm until they crawl aft and lick
+our shoes.  Maybe you think the custom of carrying the stores aft just
+happened.  Only it didn't.  Before you and I were born it was
+long-established and it was established on brass tacks.  They knew what
+they were about, the old cusses, when they put the grub in the
+lazarette."
+
+Louis says there is not more than three days' regular whack in the
+galley; that the barrel of hard-tack in the forecastle will quickly go;
+and that our chickens, which they stole last night from the top of the
+'midship-house, are equivalent to no more than an additional day's
+supply.  In short, at the outside limit, we are convinced the men will be
+keen to talk surrender within the week.
+
+We are no longer sailing.  In last night's darkness we helplessly
+listened to the men loosing headsail-halyards and letting yards go down
+on the run.  Under orders of Mr. Pike I shot blindly and many times into
+the dark, but without result, save that we heard the bullets of answering
+shots strike against the chart-house.  So to-day we have not even a man
+at the wheel.  The _Elsinore_ drifts idly on an idle sea, and we stand
+regular watches in the shelter of chart-house and jiggermast.  Mr. Pike
+says it is the laziest time he has had on the whole voyage.
+
+I alternate watches with him, although when on duty there is little to be
+done, save, in the daytime, to stand rifle in hand behind the jiggermast,
+and, in the night, to lurk along the break of the poop.  Behind the chart-
+house, ready to repel assault, are my watch of four men: Tom Spink, Wada,
+Buckwheat, and Louis.  Henry, the two Japanese sail-makers, and the old
+steward compose Mr. Pike's watch.
+
+It is his orders that no one for'ard is to be allowed to show himself,
+so, to-day, when the second mate appeared at the corner of the 'midship-
+house, I made him take a quick leap back with the thud of my bullet
+against the iron wall a foot from his head.  Charles David tried the same
+game and was similarly stimulated.
+
+Also, this evening, after dark, Mr. Pike put block-and-tackle on the
+first section of the bridge, heaved it out of place, and lowered it upon
+the poop.  Likewise he hoisted in the ladder at the break of the poop
+that leads down to the main deck.  The men will have to do some climbing
+if they ever elect to rush us.
+
+I am writing this in my watch below.  I came off duty at eight o'clock,
+and at midnight I go on deck to stay till four to-morrow morning.  Wada
+shakes his head and says that the Blackwood Company should rebate us on
+the first-class passage paid in advance.  We are working our passage, he
+contends.
+
+Margaret takes the adventure joyously.  It is the first time she has
+experienced mutiny, but she is such a thorough sea-woman that she appears
+like an old hand at the game.  She leaves the deck to the mate and me;
+but, still acknowledging his leadership, she has taken charge below and
+entirely manages the commissary, the cooking, and the sleeping
+arrangements.  We still keep our old quarters, and she has bedded the new-
+comers in the big after-room with blankets issued from the slop-chest.
+
+In a way, from the standpoint of her personal welfare, the mutiny is the
+best thing that could have happened to her.  It has taken her mind off
+her father and filled her waking hours with work to do.  This afternoon,
+standing above the open booby-hatch, I heard her laugh ring out as in the
+old days coming down the Atlantic.  Yes, and she hums snatches of songs
+under her breath as she works.  In the second dog-watch this evening,
+after Mr. Pike had finished dinner and joined us on the poop, she told
+him that if he did not soon re-rig his phonograph she was going to start
+in on the piano.  The reason she advanced was the psychological effect
+such sounds of revelry would have on the starving mutineers.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The days pass, and nothing of moment happens.  We get nowhere.  The
+_Elsinore_, without the steadying of her canvas, rolls emptily and drifts
+a lunatic course.  Sometimes she is bow on to the wind, and at other
+times she is directly before it; but at all times she is circling vaguely
+and hesitantly to get somewhere else than where she is.  As an
+illustration, at daylight this morning she came up into the wind as if
+endeavouring to go about.  In the course of half an hour she worked off
+till the wind was directly abeam.  In another half hour she was back into
+the wind.  Not until evening did she manage to get the wind on her port
+bow; but when she did, she immediately paid off, accomplished the
+complete circle in an hour, and recommenced her morning tactics of trying
+to get into the wind.
+
+And there is nothing for us to do save hold the poop against the attack
+that is never made.  Mr. Pike, more from force of habit than anything
+else, takes his regular observations and works up the _Elsinore's_
+position.  This noon she was eight miles east of yesterday's position,
+yet to-day's position, in longitude, was within a mile of where she was
+four days ago.  On the other hand she invariably makes nothing at the
+rate of seven or eight miles a day.
+
+Aloft, the _Elsinore_ is a sad spectacle.  All is confusion and disorder.
+The sails, unfurled, are a slovenly mess along the yards, and many loose
+ends sway dismally to every roll.  The only yard that is loose is the
+main-yard.  It is fortunate that wind and wave are mild, else would the
+iron-work carry away and the mutineers find the huge thing of steel about
+their ears.
+
+There is one thing we cannot understand.  A week has passed, and the men
+show no signs of being starved into submission.  Repeatedly and in vain
+has Mr. Pike interrogated the hands aft with us.  One and all, from the
+cook to Buckwheat, they swear they have no knowledge of any food for'ard,
+save the small supply in the galley and the barrel of hardtack in the
+forecastle.  Yet it is very evident that those for'ard are not starving.
+We see the smoke from the galley-stove and can only conclude that they
+have food to cook.
+
+Twice has Bert Rhine attempted a truce, but both times his white flag, as
+soon as it showed above the edge of the 'midship-house, was fired upon by
+Mr. Pike.  The last occurrence was two days ago.  It is Mr. Pike's
+intention thoroughly to starve them into submission, but now he is
+beginning to worry about their mysterious food supply.
+
+Mr. Pike is not quite himself.  He is obsessed, I know beyond any doubt,
+with the idea of vengeance on the second mate.  On divers occasions, now,
+I have come unexpectedly upon him and found him muttering to himself with
+grim set face, or clenching and unclenching his big square fists and
+grinding his teeth.  His conversation continually runs upon the
+feasibility of our making a night attack for'ard, and he is perpetually
+questioning Tom Spink and Louis on their ideas of where the various men
+may be sleeping--the point of which always is: _Where is the second mate
+likely to be sleeping_?
+
+No later than yesterday afternoon did he give me most positive proof of
+his obsession.  It was four o'clock, the beginning of the first
+dog-watch, and he had just relieved me.  So careless have we grown, that
+we now stand in broad daylight at the exposed break of the poop.  Nobody
+shoots at us, and, occasionally, over the top of the for'ard-house,
+Shorty sticks up his head and grins or makes clownish faces at us.  At
+such times Mr. Pike studies Shorty's features through the telescope in an
+effort to find signs of starvation.  Yet he admits dolefully that Shorty
+is looking fleshed-up.
+
+But to return.  Mr. Pike had just relieved me yesterday afternoon, when
+the second mate climbed the forecastle-head and sauntered to the very
+eyes of the _Elsinore_, where he stood gazing overside.
+
+"Take a crack at 'm," Mr. Pike said.
+
+It was a long shot, and I was taking slow and careful aim, when he
+touched my arm.
+
+"No; don't," he said.
+
+I lowered the little rifle and looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"You might hit him," he explained.  "And I want him for myself."
+
+* * * * *
+
+Life is never what we expect it to be.  All our voyage from Baltimore
+south to the Horn and around the Horn has been marked by violence and
+death.  And now that it has culminated in open mutiny there is no more
+violence, much less death.  We keep to ourselves aft, and the mutineers
+keep to themselves for'ard.  There is no more harshness, no more snarling
+and bellowing of commands; and in this fine weather a general festival
+obtains.
+
+Aft, Mr. Pike and Margaret alternate with phonograph and piano; and
+for'ard, although we cannot see them, a full-fledged "foo-foo" band makes
+most of the day and night hideous.  A squealing accordion that Tom Spink
+says was the property of Mike Cipriani is played by Guido Bombini, who
+sets the pace and seems the leader of the foo-foo.  There are two broken-
+reeded harmonicas.  Someone plays a jew's-harp.  Then there are home-made
+fifes and whistles and drums, combs covered with paper, extemporized
+triangles, and bones made from ribs of salt horse such as negro minstrels
+use.
+
+The whole crew seems to compose the band, and, like a lot of monkey-folk
+rejoicing in rude rhythm, emphasizes the beat by hammering kerosene cans,
+frying-pans, and all sorts of things metallic or reverberant.  Some
+genius has rigged a line to the clapper of the ship's bell on the
+forecastle-head and clangs it horribly in the big foo-foo crises, though
+Bombini can be heard censuring him severely on occasion.  And to cap it
+all, the fog-horn machine pumps in at the oddest moments in imitation of
+a big bass viol.
+
+And this is mutiny on the high seas!  Almost every hour of my
+deck-watches I listen to this infernal din, and am maddened into desire
+to join with Mr. Pike in a night attack and put these rebellious and
+inharmonious slaves to work.
+
+Yet they are not entirely inharmonious.  Guido Bombini has a respectable
+though untrained tenor voice, and has surprised me by a variety of
+selections, not only from Verdi, but from Wagner and Massenet.  Bert
+Rhine and his crowd are full of rag-time junk, and one phrase that has
+caught the fancy of all hands, and which they roar out at all times, is:
+"_It's a bear_! _ It's a bear_! _ It's a bear_!"  This morning Nancy,
+evidently very strongly urged, gave a doleful rendering of _Flying
+Cloud_.  Yes, and in the second dog-watch last evening our three topaz-
+eyed dreamers sang some folk-song strangely sweet and sad.
+
+And this is mutiny!  As I write I can scarcely believe it.  Yet I know
+Mr. Pike keeps the watch over my head.  I hear the shrill laughter of the
+steward and Louis over some ancient Chinese joke.  Wada and the
+sail-makers, in the pantry, are, I know, talking Japanese politics.  And
+from across the cabin, along the narrow halls, I can hear Margaret softly
+humming as she goes to bed.
+
+But all doubts vanish at the stroke of eight bells, when I go on deck to
+relieve Mr. Pike, who lingers a moment for a "gain," as he calls it.
+
+"Say," he said confidentially, "you and I can clean out the whole gang.
+All we got to do is sneak for'ard and turn loose.  As soon as we begin to
+shoot up, half of 'em'll bolt aft--lobsters like Nancy, an' Sundry
+Buyers, an' Jacobsen, an' Bob, an' Shorty, an' them three castaways, for
+instance.  An' while they're doin' that, an' our bunch on the poop is
+takin' 'em in, you an' me can make a pretty big hole in them that's left.
+What d'ye say?"
+
+I hesitated, thinking of Margaret.
+
+"Why, say," he urged, "once I jumped into that fo'c's'le, at close range,
+I'd start right in, blim-blam-blim, fast as you could wink, nailing them
+gangsters, an' Bombini, an' the Sheeny, an' Deacon, an' the Cockney, an'
+Mulligan Jacobs, an' . . . an' . . . Waltham."
+
+"That would be mine," I smiled.  "You've only eight shots in your Colt."
+
+Mr. Pike considered a moment, and revised his list.  "All right," he
+agreed, "I guess I'll have to let Jacobs go.  What d'ye say?  Are you
+game?"
+
+Still I hesitated, but before I could speak he anticipated me and
+returned to his fidelity.
+
+"No, you can't do it, Mr. Pathurst.  If by any luck they got the both of
+us . . . No; we'll just stay aft and sit tight until they're starved to
+it . . . But where they get their tucker gets me.  For'ard she's as bare
+as a bone, as any decent ship ought to be, and yet look at 'em, rolling
+hog fat.  And by rights they ought to a-quit eatin' a week ago."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+Yes, it is certainly mutiny.  Collecting water from the leaders of the
+chart-house in a shower of rain this morning, Buckwheat exposed himself,
+and a long, lucky revolver-shot from for'ard caught him in the shoulder.
+The bullet was small-calibre and spent ere it reached him, so that he
+received no more than a flesh-wound, though he carried on as if he were
+dying until Mr. Pike hushed his noise by cuffing his ears.
+
+I should not like to have Mr. Pike for my surgeon.  He probed for the
+bullet with his little finger, which was far too big for the aperture;
+and with his little finger, while with his other hand he threatened
+another ear-clout, he gouged out the leaden pellet.  Then he sent the boy
+below, where Margaret took him in charge with antiseptics and dressings.
+
+I see her so rarely that a half-hour alone with her these days is an
+adventure.  She is busy morning to night in keeping her house in order.
+As I write this, through my open door I can hear her laying the law down
+to the men in the after-room.  She has issued underclothes all around
+from the slop-chest, and is ordering them to take a bath in the
+rain-water just caught.  And to make sure of their thoroughness in the
+matter, she has told off Louis and the steward to supervise the
+operation.  Also, she has forbidden them smoking their pipes in the after-
+room.  And, to cap everything, they are to scrub walls, ceiling,
+everything, and then start to-morrow morning at painting.  All of which
+serves to convince me almost that mutiny does not obtain and that I have
+imagined it.
+
+But no.  I hear Buckwheat blubbering and demanding how he can take a bath
+in his wounded condition.  I wait and listen for Margaret's judgment.  Nor
+am I disappointed.  Tom Spink and Henry are told off to the task, and the
+thorough scrubbing of Buckwheat is assured.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The mutineers are not starving.  To-day they have been fishing for
+albatrosses.  A few minutes after they caught the first one its carcase
+was flung overboard.  Mr. Pike studied it through his sea-glasses, and I
+heard him grit his teeth when he made certain that it was not the mere
+feathers and skin but the entire carcass.  They had taken only its wing-
+bones to make into pipe-stems.  The inference was obvious: _starving men
+would not throw meat away in such fashion_.
+
+But where do they get their food?  It is a sea-mystery in itself,
+although I might not so deem it were it not for Mr. Pike.
+
+"I think, and think, till my brain is all frazzled out," he tells me;
+"and yet I can't get a line on it.  I know every inch of space on the
+_Elsinore_, and know there isn't an ounce of grub anywhere for'ard, and
+yet they eat!  I've overhauled the lazarette.  As near as I can make it
+out, nothing is missing.  Then where do they get it?  That's what I want
+to know.  Where do they get it?"
+
+I know that this morning he spent hours in the lazarette with the steward
+and the cook, overhauling and checking off from the lists of the
+Baltimore agents.  And I know that they came up out of the lazarette, the
+three of them, dripping with perspiration and baffled.  The steward has
+raised the hypothesis that, first of all, there were extra stores left
+over from the previous voyage, or from previous voyages, and, next, that
+the stealing of these stores must have taken place during the
+night-watches when it was Mr. Pike's turn below.
+
+At any rate, the mate takes the food mystery almost as much to heart as
+he takes the persistent and propinquitous existence of Sidney Waltham.
+
+I am coming to realize the meaning of watch-and-watch.  To begin with, I
+spend on deck twelve hours, and a fraction more, of each twenty-four.  A
+fair portion of the remaining twelve is spent in eating, in dressing, and
+in undressing, and with Margaret.  As a result, I feel the need for more
+sleep than I am getting.  I scarcely read at all, now.  The moment my
+head touches the pillow I am asleep.  Oh, I sleep like a baby, eat like a
+navvy, and in years have not enjoyed such physical well-being.  I tried
+to read George Moore last night, and was dreadfully bored.  He may be a
+realist, but I solemnly aver he does not know reality on that tight,
+little, sheltered-life archipelago of his.  If he could wind-jam around
+the Horn just one voyage he would be twice the writer.
+
+And Mr. Pike, for practically all of his sixty-nine years, has stood his
+watch-and-watch, with many a spill-over of watches into watches.  And yet
+he is iron.  In a struggle with him I am confident that he would break me
+like so much straw.  He is truly a prodigy of a man, and, so far as to-
+day is concerned, an anachronism.
+
+The Faun is not dead, despite my unlucky bullet.  Henry insisted that he
+caught a glimpse of him yesterday.  To-day I saw him myself.  He came to
+the corner of the 'midship-house and gazed wistfully aft at the poop,
+straining and eager to understand.  In the same way I have often seen
+Possum gaze at me.
+
+It has just struck me that of our eight followers five are Asiatic and
+only three are our own breed.  Somehow it reminds me of India and of
+Clive and Hastings.
+
+And the fine weather continues, and we wonder how long a time must elapse
+ere our mutineers eat up their mysterious food and are starved back to
+work.
+
+We are almost due west of Valparaiso and quite a bit less than a thousand
+miles off the west coast of South America.  The light northerly breezes,
+varying from north-east to west, would, according to Mr. Pike, work us in
+nicely for Valparaiso if only we had sail on the _Elsinore_.  As it is,
+sailless, she drifts around and about and makes nowhere save for the
+slight northerly drift each day.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Mr. Pike is beside himself.  In the past two days he has displayed
+increasing possession of himself by the one idea of vengeance on the
+second mate.  It is not the mutiny, irksome as it is and helpless as it
+makes him; it is the presence of the murderer of his old-time and admired
+skipper, Captain Somers.
+
+The mate grins at the mutiny, calls it a snap, speaks gleefully of how
+his wages are running up, and regrets that he is not ashore, where he
+would be able to take a hand in gambling on the reinsurance.  But the
+sight of Sidney Waltham, calmly gazing at sea and sky from the forecastle-
+head, or astride the far end of the bowsprit and fishing for sharks,
+saddens him.  Yesterday, coming to relieve me, he borrowed my rifle and
+turned loose the stream of tiny pellets on the second mate, who coolly
+made his line secure ere he scrambled in-board.  Of course, it was only
+one chance in a hundred that Mr. Pike might have hit him, but Sidney
+Waltham did not care to encourage the chance.
+
+And yet it is not like mutiny--not like the conventional mutiny I
+absorbed as a boy, and which has become classic in the literature of the
+sea.  There is no hand-to-hand fighting, no crash of cannon and flash of
+cutlass, no sailors drinking grog, no lighted matches held over open
+powder-magazines.  Heavens!--there isn't a single cutlass nor a powder-
+magazine on board.  And as for grog, not a man has had a drink since
+Baltimore.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Well, it is mutiny after all.  I shall never doubt it again.  It may be
+nineteen-thirteen mutiny on a coal-carrier, with feeblings and imbeciles
+and criminals for mutineers; but at any rate mutiny it is, and at least
+in the number of deaths it is reminiscent of the old days.  For things
+have happened since last I had opportunity to write up this log.  For
+that matter, I am now the keeper of the _Elsinore's_ official log as
+well, in which work Margaret helps me.
+
+And I might have known it would happen.  At four yesterday morning I
+relieved Mr. Pike.  When in the darkness I came up to him at the break of
+the poop, I had to speak to him twice to make him aware of my presence.
+And then he merely grunted acknowledgment in an absent sort of way.
+
+The next moment he brightened up, and was himself save that he was too
+bright.  He was making an effort.  I felt this, but was quite unprepared
+for what followed.
+
+"I'll be back in a minute," he said, as he put his leg over the rail and
+lightly and swiftly lowered himself down into the darkness.
+
+There was nothing I could do.  To cry out or to attempt to reason with
+him would only have drawn the mutineers' attention.  I heard his feet
+strike the deck beneath as he let go.  Immediately he started for'ard.
+Little enough precaution he took.  I swear that clear to the 'midship-
+house I heard the dragging age-lag of his feet.  Then that ceased, and
+that was all.
+
+I repeat.  That was all.  Never a sound came from for'ard.  I held my
+watch till daylight.  I held it till Margaret came on deck with her
+cheery "What ho of the night, brave mariner?"  I held the next watch
+(which should have been the mate's) till midday, eating both breakfast
+and lunch behind the sheltering jiggermast.  And I held all afternoon,
+and through both dog-watches, my dinner served likewise on the deck.
+
+And that was all.  Nothing happened.  The galley-stove smoked three
+times, advertising the cooking of three meals.  Shorty made faces at me
+as usual across the rim of the for'ard-house.  The Maltese Cockney caught
+an albatross.  There was some excitement when Tony the Greek hooked a
+shark off the jib-boom, so big that half a dozen tailed on to the line
+and failed to land it.  But I caught no glimpse of Mr. Pike nor of the
+renegade Sidney Waltham.
+
+In short, it was a lazy, quiet day of sunshine and gentle breeze.  There
+was no inkling to what had happened to the mate.  Was he a prisoner?  Was
+he already overside?  Why were there no shots?  He had his big automatic.
+It is inconceivable that he did not use it at least once.  Margaret and I
+discussed the affair till we were well a-weary, but reached no
+conclusion.
+
+She is a true daughter of the race.  At the end of the second dog-watch,
+armed with her father's revolver, she insisted on standing the first
+watch of the night.  I compromised with the inevitable by having Wada
+make up my bed on the deck in the shelter of the cabin skylight just
+for'ard of the jiggermast.  Henry, the two sail-makers and the steward,
+variously equipped with knives and clubs, were stationed along the break
+of the poop.
+
+And right here I wish to pass my first criticism on modern mutiny.  On
+ships like the _Elsinore_ there are not enough weapons to go around.  The
+only firearms now aft are Captain West's .38 Colt revolver, and my .22
+automatic Winchester.  The old steward, with a penchant for hacking and
+chopping, has his long knife and a butcher's cleaver.  Henry, in addition
+to his sheath-knife, has a short bar of iron.  Louis, despite a most
+sanguinary array of butcher-knives and a big poker, pins his cook's faith
+on hot water and sees to it that two kettles are always piping on top the
+cabin stove.  Buckwheat, who on account of his wound is getting all night
+in for a couple of nights, cherishes a hatchet.
+
+The rest of our retainers have knives and clubs, although Yatsuda, the
+first sail-maker, carries a hand-axe, and Uchino, the second sail-maker,
+sleeping or waking, never parts from a claw-hammer.  Tom Spink has a
+harpoon.  Wada, however, is the genius.  By means of the cabin stove he
+has made a sharp pike-point of iron and fitted it to a pole.  To-morrow
+be intends to make more for the other men.
+
+It is rather shuddery, however, to speculate on the terrible assortment
+of cutting, gouging, jabbing and slashing weapons with which the
+mutineers are able to equip themselves from the carpenter's shop.  If it
+ever comes to an assault on the poop there will be a weird mess of wounds
+for the survivors to dress.  For that matter, master as I am of my little
+rifle, no man could gain the poop in the day-time.  Of course, if rush
+they will, they will rush us in the night, when my rifle will be
+worthless.  Then it will be blow for blow, hand-to-hand, and the
+strongest pates and arms will win.
+
+But no.  I have just bethought me.  We shall be ready for any night-rush.
+I'll take a leaf out of modern warfare, and show them not only that we
+are top-dog (a favourite phrase of the mate), but _why_ we are top-dog.
+It is simple--night illumination.  As I write I work opt the
+idea--gasoline, balls of oakum, caps and gunpowder from a few cartridges,
+Roman candles, and flares blue, red, and green, shallow metal receptacles
+to carry the explosive and inflammable stuff; and a trigger-like
+arrangement by which, pulling on a string, the caps are exploded in the
+gunpowder and fire set to the gasoline-soaked oakum and to the flares and
+candles.  It will be brain as well as brawn against mere brawn.
+
+* * * * *
+
+I have worked like a Trojan all day, and the idea is realized.  Margaret
+helped me out with suggestions, and Tom Spink did the sailorizing.  Over
+our head, from the jiggermast, the steel stays that carry the three
+jigger-trysails descend high above the break of the poop and across the
+main deck to the mizzenmast.  A light line has been thrown over each
+stay, and been thrown repeatedly around so as to form an unslipping knot.
+Tom Spink waited till dark, when he went aloft and attached loose rings
+of stiff wire around the stays below the knots.  Also he bent on hoisting-
+gear and connected permanent fastenings with the sliding rings.  And
+further, between rings and fastenings, is a slack of fifty feet of light
+line.
+
+This is the idea: after dark each night we shall hoist our three metal
+wash-basins, loaded with inflammables, up to the stays.  The arrangement
+is such that at the first alarm of a rush, by pulling a cord the trigger
+is pulled that ignites the powder, and the very same pull operates a trip-
+device that lets the rings slide down the steel stays.  Of course,
+suspended from the rings, are the illuminators, and when they have run
+down the stays fifty feet the lines will automatically bring them to
+rest.  Then all the main deck between the poop and the mizzen-mast will
+be flooded with light, while we shall be in comparative darkness.
+
+Of course each morning before daylight we shall lower all this apparatus
+to the deck, so that the men for'ard will not guess what we have up our
+sleeve, or, rather, what we have up on the trysail-stays.  Even to-day
+the little of our gear that has to be left standing aroused their
+curiosity.  Head after head showed over the edge of the for'ard-house as
+they peeped and peered and tried to make out what we were up to.  Why, I
+find myself almost looking forward to an attack in order to see the
+device work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+
+And what has happened to Mr. Pike remains a mystery.  For that matter,
+what has happened to the second mate?  In the past three days we have by
+our eyes taken the census of the mutineers.  Every man has been seen by
+us with the sole exception of Mr. Mellaire, or Sidney Waltham, as I
+assume I must correctly name him.  He has not appeared--does not appear;
+and we can only speculate and conjecture.
+
+In the past three days various interesting things have taken place.
+Margaret stands watch and watch with me, day and night, the clock around;
+for there is no one of our retainers to whom we can entrust the
+responsibility of a watch.  Though mutiny obtains and we are besieged in
+the high place, the weather is so mild and there is so little call on our
+men that they have grown careless and sleep aft of the chart-house when
+it is their watch on deck.  Nothing ever happens, and, like true sailors,
+they wax fat and lazy.  Even have I found Louis, the steward, and Wada
+guilty of cat-napping.  In fact, the training-ship boy, Henry, is the
+only one who has never lapsed.
+
+Oh, yes, and I gave Tom Spink a thrashing yesterday.  Since the
+disappearance of the mate he had had little faith in me, and had been
+showing vague signs of insolence and insubordination.  Both Margaret and
+I had noted it independently.  Day before yesterday we talked it over.
+
+"He is a good sailor, but weak," she said.  "If we let him go on, he will
+infect the rest."
+
+"Very well, I'll take him in hand," I announced valorously.
+
+"You will have to," she encouraged.  "Be hard.  Be hard.  You must be
+hard."
+
+Those who sit in the high places must be hard, yet have I discovered that
+it is hard to be hard.  For instance, easy enough was it to drop Steve
+Roberts as he was in the act of shooting at me.  Yet it is most difficult
+to be hard with a chuckle-headed retainer like Tom Spink--especially when
+he continually fails by a shade to give sufficient provocation.  For
+twenty-four hours after my talk with Margaret I was on pins and needles
+to have it out with him, yet rather than have had it out with him I
+should have preferred to see the poop rushed by the gang from the other
+side.
+
+Not in a day can the tyro learn to employ the snarling immediacy of
+mastery of Mr. Pike, nor the reposeful, voiceless mastery of a Captain
+West.  Truly, the situation was embarrassing.  I was not trained in the
+handling of men, and Tom Spink knew it in his chuckle-headed way.  Also,
+in his chuckle-headed way, he was dispirited by the loss of the mate.
+Fearing the mate, nevertheless he had depended on the mate to fetch him
+through with a whole skin, or at least alive.  On me he has no
+dependence.  What chance had the gentleman passenger and the captain's
+daughter against the gang for'ard?  So he must have reasoned, and, so
+reasoning, become despairing and desperate.
+
+After Margaret had told me to be hard I watched Tom Spink with an eagle
+eye, and he must have sensed my attitude, for he carefully forebore from
+overstepping, while all the time he palpitated just on the edge of
+overstepping.  Yes, and it was clear that Buckwheat was watching to learn
+the outcome of this veiled refractoriness.  For that matter, the
+situation was not being missed by our keen-eyed Asiatics, and I know that
+I caught Louis several times verging on the offence of offering me
+advice.  But he knew his place and managed to keep his tongue between his
+teeth.
+
+At last, yesterday, while I held the watch, Tom Spink was guilty of
+spitting tobacco juice on the deck.
+
+Now it must be understood that such an act is as grave an offence of the
+sea as blasphemy is of the Church.
+
+It was Margaret who came to where I was stationed by the jiggermast and
+told me what had occurred; and it was she who took my rifle and relieved
+me so that I could go aft.
+
+There was the offensive spot, and there was Tom Spink, his cheek bulging
+with a quid.
+
+"Here, you, get a swab and mop that up," I commanded in my harshest
+manner.
+
+Tom Spink merely rolled his quid with his tongue and regarded me with
+sneering thoughtfulness.  I am sure he was no more surprised than was I
+by the immediateness of what followed.  My fist went out like an arrow
+from a released bow, and Tom Spink staggered back, tripped against the
+corner of the tarpaulin-covered sounding-machine, and sprawled on the
+deck.  He tried to make a fight of it, but I followed him up, giving him
+no chance to set himself or recover from the surprise of my first
+onslaught.
+
+Now it so happens that not since I was a boy have I struck a person with
+my naked fist, and I candidly admit that I enjoyed the trouncing I
+administered to poor Tom Spink.  Yes, and in the rapid play about the
+deck I caught a glimpse of Margaret.  She had stepped out of the shelter
+of the mast and was looking on from the corner of the chart-house.  Yes,
+and more; she was looking on with a cool, measuring eye.
+
+Oh, it was all very grotesque, to be sure.  But then, mutiny on the high
+seas in the year nineteen-thirteen is also grotesque.  No lists here
+between mailed knights for a lady's favour, but merely the trouncing of a
+chuckle-head for spitting on the deck of a coal-carrier.  Nevertheless,
+the fact that my lady looked on added zest to my enterprise, and,
+doubtlessly, speed and weight to my blows, and at least half a dozen
+additional clouts to the unlucky sailor.
+
+Yes, man is strangely and wonderfully made.  Now that I coolly consider
+the matter, I realize that it was essentially the same spirit with which
+I enjoyed beating up Tom Spink, that I have in the past enjoyed contests
+of the mind in which I have out-epigrammed clever opponents.  In the one
+case, one proves himself top-dog of the mind; in the other, top-dog of
+the muscle.  Whistler and Wilde were just as much intellectual bullies as
+I was a physical bully yesterday morning when I punched Tom Spink into
+lying down and staying down.
+
+And my knuckles are sore and swollen.  I cease writing for a moment to
+look at them and to hope that they will not stay permanently enlarged.
+
+At any rate, Tom Spink took his disciplining and promised to come in and
+be good.
+
+"Sir!" I thundered at him, quite in Mr. Pike's most bloodthirsty manner.
+
+"Sir," he mumbled with bleeding lips.  "Yes, sir, I'll mop it up, sir.
+Yes, sir."
+
+I could scarcely keep from laughing in his face, the whole thing was so
+ludicrous; but I managed to look my haughtiest, and sternest, and
+fiercest, while I superintended the deck-cleansing.  The funniest thing
+about the affair was that I must have knocked Tom Spink's quid down his
+throat, for he was gagging and hiccoughing all the time he mopped and
+scrubbed.
+
+The atmosphere aft has been wonderfully clear ever since.  Tom Spink
+obeys all orders on the jump, and Buckwheat jumps with equal celerity.  As
+for the five Asiatics, I feel that they are stouter behind me now that I
+have shown masterfulness.  By punching a man's face I verily believe I
+have doubled our united strength.  And there is no need to punch any of
+the rest.  The Asiatics are keen and willing.  Henry is a true cadet of
+the breed, Buckwheat will follow Tom Spink's lead, and Tom Spink, a
+proper Anglo-Saxon peasant, will lead Buckwheat all the better by virtue
+of the punching.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Two days have passed, and two noteworthy things have happened.  The men
+seem to be nearing the end of their mysterious food supply, and we have
+had our first truce.
+
+I have noted, through the glasses, that no more carcasses of the
+mollyhawks they are now catching are thrown overboard.  This means that
+they have begun to eat the tough and unsavoury creatures, although it
+does not mean, of course, that they have entirely exhausted their other
+stores.
+
+It was Margaret, her sailor's eye on the falling barometer and on the
+"making" stuff adrift in the sky, who called my attention to a coming
+blow.
+
+"As soon as the sea rises," she said, "we'll have that loose main-yard
+and all the rest of the top-hamper tumbling down on deck."
+
+So it was that I raised the white flag for a parley.  Bert Rhine and
+Charles Davis came abaft the 'midship-house, and, while we talked, many
+faces peered over the for'ard edge of the house and many forms slouched
+into view on the deck on each side of the house.
+
+"Well, getting tired?" was Bert Rhine's insolent greeting.  "Anything we
+can do for you?"
+
+"Yes, there is," I answered sharply.  "You can save your heads so that
+when you return to work there will be enough of you left to do the work."
+
+"If you are making threats--" Charles Davis began, but was silenced by a
+glare from the gangster.
+
+"Well, what is it?" Bert Rhine demanded.  "Cough it off your chest."
+
+"It's for your own good," was my reply.  "It is coming on to blow, and
+all that unfurled canvas aloft will bring the yards down on your heads.
+We're safe here, aft.  You are the ones who will run risks, and it is up
+to you to hustle your crowd aloft and make things fast and ship-shape."
+
+"And if we don't?" the gangster sneered.
+
+"Why, you'll take your chances, that is all," I answered carelessly.  "I
+just want to call your attention to the fact that one of those steel
+yards, end-on, will go through the roof of your forecastle as if it were
+so much eggshell."
+
+Bert Rhine looked to Charles Davis for verification, and the latter
+nodded.
+
+"We'll talk it over first," the gangster announced.
+
+"And I'll give you ten minutes," I returned.  "If at the end of ten
+minutes you've not started taking in, it will be too late.  I shall put a
+bullet into any man who shows himself."
+
+"All right, we'll talk it over."
+
+As they started to go back, I called:
+
+"One moment."
+
+They stopped and turned about.
+
+"What have you done to Mr. Pike?" I asked.
+
+Even the impassive Bert Rhine could not quite conceal his surprise.
+
+"An' what have you done with Mr. Mellaire!" he retorted.  "You tell us,
+an' we'll tell you."
+
+I am confident of the genuineness of his surprise.  Evidently the
+mutineers have been believing us guilty of the disappearance of the
+second mate, just as we have been believing them guilty of the
+disappearance of the first mate.  The more I dwell upon it the more it
+seems the proposition of the Kilkenny cats, a case of mutual destruction
+on the part of the two mates.
+
+"Another thing," I said quickly.  "Where do you get your food?"
+
+Bert Rhine laughed one of his silent laughs; Charles Davis assumed an
+expression of mysteriousness and superiority; and Shorty, leaping into
+view from the corner of the house, danced a jig of triumph.
+
+I drew out my watch.
+
+"Remember," I said, "you've ten minutes in which to make a start."
+
+They turned and went for'ard, and, before the ten minutes were up, all
+hands were aloft and stowing canvas.  All this time the wind, out of the
+north-west, was breezing up.  The old familiar harp-chords of a rising
+gale were strumming along the rigging, and the men, I verily believe from
+lack of practice, were particularly slow at their work.
+
+"It would be better if the upper-and-lower top-sails are set so that we
+can heave to," Margaret suggested.  "They will steady her and make it
+more comfortable for us."
+
+I seized the idea and improved upon it.
+
+"Better set the upper and lower topsails so that we can handle the ship,"
+I called to the gangster, who was ordering the men about, quite like a
+mate, from the top of the 'midship-house.
+
+He considered the idea, and then gave the proper orders, although it was
+the Maltese Cockney, with Nancy and Sundry Buyers under him, who carried
+the orders out.
+
+I ordered Tom Spink to the long-idle wheel, and gave him the course,
+which was due east by the steering compass.  This put the wind on our
+port quarter, so that the _Elsinore_ began to move through the water
+before a fair breeze.  And due east, less than a thousand miles away, lay
+the coast of South America and the port of Valparaiso.
+
+Strange to say, none of our mutineers objected to this, and after dark,
+as we tore along before a full-sized gale, I sent my own men up on top
+the chart-house to take the gaskets off the spanker.  This was the only
+sail we could set and trim and in every way control.  It is true the
+mizzen-braces were still rigged aft to the poop, according to Horn
+practice.  But, while we could thus trim the mizzen-yards, the sails
+themselves, in setting or furling, were in the hands of the for'ard
+crowd.
+
+Margaret, beside me in the darkness at the break of the poop, put her
+hand in mine with a warm pressure, as both our tiny watches swayed up the
+spanker and as both of us held our breaths in an effort to feel the added
+draw in the _Elsinore's_ speed.
+
+"I never wanted to marry a sailor," she said.  "And I thought I was safe
+in the hands of a landsman like you.  And yet here you are, with all the
+stuff of the sea in you, running down your easting for port.  Next thing,
+I suppose, I'll see you out with a sextant, shooting the sun or making
+star-observations."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+
+Four more days have passed; the gale has blown itself out; we are not
+more than three hundred and fifty miles off Valparaiso; and the
+_Elsinore_, this time due to me and my own stubbornness, is rolling in
+the wind and heading nowhere in a light breeze at the rate of nothing but
+driftage per hour.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in the three days and nights of the gale, we
+logged as much as eight, and even nine, knots.  What bothered me was the
+acquiescence of the mutineers in my programme.  They were sensible enough
+in the simple matter of geography to know what I was doing.  They had
+control of the sails, and yet they permitted me to run for the South
+American coast.
+
+More than that, as the gale eased on the morning of the third day, they
+actually went aloft, set top-gallant-sails, royals, and skysails, and
+trimmed the yards to the quartering breeze.  This was too much for the
+Saxon streak in me, whereupon I wore the _Elsinore_ about before the
+wind, fetched her up upon it, and lashed the wheel.  Margaret and I are
+agreed in the hypothesis that their plan is to get inshore until land is
+sighted, at which time they will desert in the boats.
+
+"But we don't want them to desert," she proclaims with flashing eyes.  "We
+are bound for Seattle.  They must return to duty.  They've got to, soon,
+for they are beginning to starve."
+
+"There isn't a navigator aft," I oppose.
+
+Promptly she withers me with her scorn.
+
+"You, a master of books, by all the sea-blood in your body should be able
+to pick up the theoretics of navigation while I snap my fingers.
+Furthermore, remember that I can supply the seamanship.  Why, any
+squarehead peasant, in a six months' cramming course at any seaport
+navigation school, can pass the examiners for his navigator's papers.
+That means six hours for you.  And less.  If you can't, after an hour's
+reading and an hour's practice with the sextant, take a latitude
+observation and work it out, I'll do it for you."
+
+"You mean you know?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I mean, from the little I know, that I know I can learn to know a
+meridian sight and the working out of it.  I mean that I can learn to
+know inside of two hours."
+
+Strange to say, the gale, after easing to a mild breeze, recrudesced in a
+sort of after-clap.  With sails untrimmed and flapping, the consequent
+smashing, crashing, and rending of our gear can be imagined.  It brought
+out in alarm every man for'ard.
+
+"Trim the yards!" I yelled at Bert Rhine, who, backed for counsel by
+Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney, actually came directly beneath me
+on the main deck in order to hear above the commotion aloft.
+
+"Keep a-runnin, an' you won't have to trim," the gangster shouted up to
+me.
+
+"Want to make land, eh?" I girded down at him.  "Getting hungry, eh?
+Well, you won't make land or anything else in a thousand years once you
+get all your top-hamper piled down on deck."
+
+I have forgotten to state that this occurred at midday yesterday.
+
+"What are you goin' to do if we trim?" Charles Davis broke in.
+
+"Run off shore," I replied, "and get your gang out in deep sea where it
+will be starved back to duty."
+
+"We'll furl, an' let you heave to," the gangster proposed.
+
+I shook my head and held up my rifle.  "You'll have to go aloft to do it,
+and the first man that gets into the shrouds will get this."
+
+"Then she can go to hell for all we care," he said, with emphatic
+conclusiveness.
+
+And just then the fore-topgallant-yard carried away--luckily as the bow
+was down-pitched into a trough of sea-and when the slow, confused, and
+tangled descent was accomplished the big stick lay across the wreck of
+both bulwarks and of that portion of the bridge between the foremast and
+the forecastle head.
+
+Bert Rhine heard, but could not see, the damage wrought.  He looked up at
+me challengingly, and sneered:
+
+"Want some more to come down?"
+
+It could not have happened more apropos.  The port-brace, and immediately
+afterwards the starboard-brace, of the crojack-yard--carried away.  This
+was the big, lowest spar on the mizzen, and as the huge thing of steel
+swung wildly back and forth the gangster and his followers turned and
+crouched as they looked up to see.  Next, the gooseneck of the truss, on
+which it pivoted, smashed away.  Immediately the lifts and lower-topsail
+sheets parted, and with a fore-and-aft pitch of the ship the spar
+up-ended and crashed to the deck upon Number Three hatch, destroying that
+section of the bridge in its fall.
+
+All this was new to the gangster--as it was to me--but Charles Davis and
+the Maltese Cockney thoroughly apprehended the situation.
+
+"Stand out from under!" I yelled sardonically; and the three of them
+cowered and shrank away as their eyes sought aloft for what new spar was
+thundering down upon them.
+
+The lower-topsail, its sheets parted by the fall of the crojack-yard, was
+tearing out of the bolt-ropes and ribboning away to leeward and making
+such an uproar that they might well expect its yard to carry away.  Since
+this wreckage of our beautiful gear was all new to me, I was quite
+prepared to see the thing happen.
+
+The gangster-leader, no sailor, but, after months at sea, intelligent
+enough and nervously strong enough to appreciate the danger, turned his
+head and looked up at me.  And I will do him the credit to say that he
+took his time while all our world of gear aloft seemed smashing to
+destruction.
+
+"I guess we'll trim yards," he capitulated.
+
+"Better get the skysails and royals off," Margaret said in my ear.
+
+"While you're about it, get in the skysails and royals!" I shouted down.
+"And make a decent job of the gasketing!"
+
+Both Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney advertised their relief in
+their faces as they heard my words, and, at a nod from the gangster, they
+started for'ard on the run to put the orders into effect.
+
+Never, in the whole voyage, did our crew spring to it in more lively
+fashion.  And lively fashion was needed to save our gear.  As it was,
+they cut away the remnants of the mizzen-lower-topsail with their sheath-
+knives, and they loosed the main-skysail out of its bolt-ropes.
+
+The first infraction of our agreement was on the main-lower-topsail.  This
+they attempted to furl.  The carrying away of the crojack and the blowing
+away of the mizzen-lower-topsail gave me freedom to see and aim, and when
+the tiny messengers from my rifle began to spat through the canvas and to
+spat against the steel of the yard, the men strung along it desisted from
+passing the gaskets.  I waved my will to Bert Rhine, who acknowledged me
+and ordered the sail set again and the yard trimmed.
+
+"What is the use of running off-shore?" I said to Margaret, when the
+kites were snugged down and all yards trimmed on the wind.  "Three
+hundred and fifty miles off the land is as good as thirty-five hundred so
+far as starvation is concerned."
+
+So, instead of making speed through the water toward deep sea, I hove the
+_Elsinore_ to on the starboard tack with no more than leeway driftage to
+the west and south.
+
+But our gallant mutineers had their will of us that very night.  In the
+darkness we could hear the work aloft going on as yards were run down,
+sheets let go, and sails dewed up and gasketed.  I did try a few random
+shots, and all my reward was to hear the whine and creak of ropes through
+sheaves and to receive an equally random fire of revolver-shots.
+
+It is a most curious situation.  We of the high place are masters of the
+steering of the _Elsinore_, while those for'ard are masters of the motor
+power.  The only sail that is wholly ours is the spanker.  They control
+absolutely--sheets, halyards, clewlines, buntlines, braces, and
+down-hauls--every sail on the fore and main.  We control the braces on
+the mizzen, although they control the canvas on the mizzen.  For that
+matter, Margaret and I fail to comprehend why they do not go aloft any
+dark night and sever the mizzen-braces at the yard-ends.  All that
+prevents this, we are decided, is laziness.  For if they did sever the
+braces that lead aft into our hands, they would be compelled to rig new
+braces for'ard in some fashion, else, in the rolling, would the
+mizzenmast be stripped of every spar.
+
+And still the mutiny we are enduring is ridiculous and grotesque.  There
+was never a mutiny like it.  It violates all standards and precedents.  In
+the old classic mutinies, long ere this, attacking like tigers, the
+seamen should have swarmed over the poop and killed most of us or been
+most of them killed.
+
+Wherefore I sneer at our gallant mutineers, and recommend trained nurses
+for them, quite in the manner of Mr. Pike.  But Margaret shakes her head
+and insists that human nature is human nature, and that under similar
+circumstances human nature will express itself similarly.  In short, she
+points to the number of deaths that have already occurred, and declares
+that on some dark night, sooner or later, whenever the pinch of hunger
+sufficiently sharpens, we shall see our rascals storming aft.
+
+And in the meantime, except for the tenseness of it, and for the
+incessant watchfulness which Margaret and I alone maintain, it is more
+like a mild adventure, more like a page out of some book of romance which
+ends happily.
+
+It is surely romance, watch and watch for a man and a woman who love, to
+relieve each other's watches.  Each such relief is a love passage and
+unforgettable.  Never was there wooing like it--the muttered surmises of
+wind and weather, the whispered councils, the kissed commands in palms of
+hands, the dared contacts of the dark.
+
+Oh, truly, I have often, since this voyage began, told the books to go
+hang.  And yet the books are at the back of the race-life of me.  I am
+what I am out of ten thousand generations of my kind.  Of that there is
+no discussion.  And yet my midnight philosophy stands the test of my
+breed.  I must have selected my books out of the ten thousand generations
+that compose me.  I have killed a man--Steve Roberts.  As a perishing
+blond without an alphabet I should have done this unwaveringly.  As a
+perishing blond with an alphabet, plus the contents in my brain of the
+philosophizing of all philosophers, I have killed this same man with the
+same unwaveringness.  Culture has not emasculated me.  I am quite
+unaffected.  It was in the day's work, and my kind have always been day-
+workers, doing the day's work, whatever it might be, in high adventure or
+dull ploddingness, and always doing it.
+
+Never would I ask to set back the dial of time or event.  I would kill
+Steve Roberts again, under the same circumstances, as a matter of course.
+When I say I am unaffected by this happening I do not quite mean it.  I
+am affected.  I am aware that the spirit of me is informed with a sober
+elation of efficiency.  I have done something that had to be done, as any
+man will do what has to be done in the course of the day's work.
+
+Yes, I am a perishing blond, and a man, and I sit in the high place and
+bend the stupid ones to my will; and I am a lover, loving a royal woman
+of my own perishing breed, and together we occupy, and shall occupy, the
+high place of government and command until our kind perish from the
+earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+
+Margaret was right.  The mutiny is not violating standards and
+precedents.  We have had our hands full for days and nights.  Ditman
+Olansen, the crank-eyed Berserker, has been killed by Wada, and the
+training-ship boy, the one lone cadet of our breed, has gone overside
+with the regulation sack of coal at his feet.  The poop has been rushed.
+My illuminating invention has proved a success.  The men are getting
+hungry, and we still sit in command in the high place.
+
+First of all the attack on the poop, two nights ago, in Margaret's watch.
+No; first, I have made another invention.  Assisted by the old steward,
+who knows, as a Chinese ought, a deal about fireworks, and getting my
+materials from our signal rockets and Roman candles, I manufactured half
+a dozen bombs.  I don't really think they are very deadly, and I know our
+extemporized fuses are slower than our voyage is at the present time; but
+nevertheless the bombs have served the purpose, as you shall see.
+
+And now to the attempt to rush the poop.  It was in Margaret's watch,
+from midnight till four in the morning, when the attack was made.
+Sleeping on the deck by the cabin skylight, I was very close to her when
+her revolver went off, and continued to go off.
+
+My first spring was to the tripping-lines on my illuminators.  The
+igniting and releasing devices worked cleverly.  I pulled two of the
+tripping-lines, and two of the contraptions exploded into light and noise
+and at the same time ran automatically down the jigger-trysail-stays, and
+automatically fetched up at the ends of their lines.  The illumination
+was instantaneous and gorgeous.  Henry, the two sail-makers, and the
+steward--at least three of them awakened from sound sleep, I am sure--ran
+to join us along the break of the poop.  All the advantage lay with us,
+for we were in the dark, while our foes were outlined against the light
+behind them.
+
+But such light!  The powder crackled, fizzed, and spluttered and spilled
+out the excess of gasolene from the flaming oakum balls so that streams
+of fire dripped down on the main deck beneath.  And the stuff of the
+signal-flares dripped red light and blue and green.
+
+There was not much of a fight, for the mutineers were shocked by our
+fireworks.  Margaret fired her revolver haphazardly, while I held my
+rifle for any that gained the poop.  But the attack faded away as quickly
+as it had come.  I did see Margaret overshoot some man, scaling the poop
+from the port-rail, and the next moment I saw Wada, charging like a
+buffalo, jab him in the chest with the spear he had made and thrust the
+boarder back and down.
+
+That was all.  The rest retreated for'ard on the dead run, while the
+three trysails, furled at the foot of the stays next to the mizzen and
+set on fire by the dripping gasolene, went up in flame and burned
+entirely away and out without setting the rest of the ship on fire.  That
+is one of the virtues of a ship steel-masted and steel-stayed.
+
+And on the deck beneath us, crumpled, twisted, face hidden so that we
+could not identify him, lay the man whom Wada had speared.
+
+And now I come to a phase of adventure that is new to me.  I have never
+found it in the books.  In short, it is carelessness coupled with
+laziness, or vice versa.  I had used two of my illuminators.  Only one
+remained.  An hour later, convinced of the movement aft of men along the
+deck, I let go the third and last and with its brightness sent them
+scurrying for'ard.  Whether they were attacking the poop tentatively to
+learn whether or not I had exhausted my illuminators, or whether or not
+they were trying to rescue Ditman Olansen, we shall never know.  The
+point is: they did come aft; they were compelled to retreat by my
+illuminator; and it was my last illuminator.  And yet I did not start in,
+there and then, to manufacture fresh ones.  This was carelessness.  It
+was laziness.  And I hazarded our lives, perhaps, if you please, on a
+psychological guess that I had convinced our mutineers that we had an
+inexhaustible stock of illuminators in reserve.
+
+The rest of Margaret's watch, which I shared with her, was undisturbed.
+At four I insisted that she go below and turn in, but she compromised by
+taking my own bed behind the skylight.
+
+At break of day I was able to make out the body, still lying as last I
+had seen it.  At seven o'clock, before breakfast, and while Margaret
+still slept, I sent the two boys, Henry and Buckwheat, down to the body.
+I stood above them, at the rail, rifle in hand and ready.  But from
+for'ard came no signs of life; and the lads, between them, rolled the
+crank-eyed Norwegian over so that we could recognize him, carried him to
+the rail, and shoved him stiffly across and into the sea.  Wada's spear-
+thrust had gone clear through him.
+
+But before twenty-four hours were up the mutineers evened the score
+handsomely.  They more than evened it, for we are so few that we cannot
+so well afford the loss of one as they can.  To begin with--and a thing I
+had anticipated and for which I had prepared my bombs--while Margaret and
+I ate a deck-breakfast in the shelter of the jiggermast a number of the
+men sneaked aft and got under the overhang of the poop.  Buckwheat saw
+them coming and yelled the alarm, but it was too late.  There was no
+direct way to get them out.  The moment I put my head over the rail to
+fire at them, I knew they would fire up at me with all the advantage in
+their favour.  They were hidden.  I had to expose myself.
+
+Two steel doors, tight-fastened and caulked against the Cape Horn seas,
+opened under the overhang of the poop from the cabin on to the main deck.
+These doors the men proceeded to attack with sledge-hammers, while the
+rest of the gang, sheltered by the 'midship-house, showed that it stood
+ready for the rush when the doors were battered down.
+
+Inside, the steward guarded one door with his hacking knife, while with
+his spear Wada guarded the other door.  Nor, while I had dispatched them
+to this duty, was I idle.  Behind the jiggermast I lighted the fuse of
+one of my extemporized bombs.  When it was sputtering nicely I ran across
+the poop to the break and dropped the bomb to the main deck beneath, at
+the same time making an effort to toss it in under the overhang where the
+men battered at the port-door.  But this effort was distracted and made
+futile by a popping of several revolver shots from the gangways
+amidships.  One _is_ jumpy when soft-nosed bullets putt-putt around him.
+As a result, the bomb rolled about on the open deck.
+
+Nevertheless, the illuminators had earned the respect of the mutineers
+for my fireworks.  The sputtering and fizzling of the fuse were too much
+for them, and from under the poop they ran for'ard like so many scuttling
+rabbits.  I know I could have got a couple with my rifle had I not been
+occupied with lighting the fuse of a second bomb.  Margaret managed three
+wild shots with her revolver, and the poop was immediately peppered by a
+scattering revolver fire from for'ard.
+
+Being provident (and lazy, for I have learned that it takes time and
+labour to manufacture home-made bombs), I pinched off the live end of the
+fuse in my hand.  But the fuse of the first bomb, rolling about on the
+main deck, merely fizzled on; and as I waited I resolved to shorten my
+remaining fuses.  Any of the men who fled, had he had the courage, could
+have pinched off the fuse, or tossed the bomb overboard, or, better yet,
+he could have tossed it up amongst us on the poop.
+
+It took fully five minutes for that blessed fuse to burn its slow length,
+and when the bomb did go off it was a sad disappointment.  I swear it
+could have been sat upon with nothing more than a jar to one's nerves.
+And yet, in so far as the intimidation goes, it did its work.  The men
+have not since ventured under the overhang of the poop.
+
+That the mutineers were getting short of food was patent.  The
+_Elsinore_, sailless, drifted about that morning, the sport of wind and
+wave; and the gang put many lines overboard for the catching of
+mollyhawks and albatrosses.  Oh, I worried the hungry fishers with my
+rifle.  No man could show himself for'ard without having a bullet whop
+against the iron-work perilously near him.  And still they caught
+birds--not, however, without danger to themselves, and not without
+numerous losses of birds due to my rifle.
+
+Their procedure was to toss their hooks and bait over the rail from
+shelter and slowly to pay the lines out as the slight windage of the
+_Elsinore's_ hull, spars, and rigging drifted her through the water.  When
+a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter, till it
+was alongside.  This was the ticklish moment.  The hook, merely a hollow
+and acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on a piece of board at
+the end of the line, held the bird by pinching its curved beak into the
+acute angle.  The moment the line slacked the bird was released.  So,
+when alongside, this was the problem: to lift the bird out of the water,
+straight up the side of the ship, without once jamming and easing and
+slacking.  When they tried to do this from shelter invariably they lost
+the bird.
+
+They worked out a method.  When the bird was alongside the several men
+with revolvers turned loose on me, while one man, overhauling and keeping
+the line taut, leaped to the rail and quickly hove the bird up and over
+and inboard.  I know this long-distance revolver fire seriously bothered
+me.  One cannot help jumping when death, in the form of a piece of flying
+lead, hits the rail beside him, or the mast over his head, or whines away
+in a ricochet from the steel shrouds.  Nevertheless, I managed with my
+rifle to bother the exposed men on the rail to the extent that they lost
+one hooked bird out of two.  And twenty-six men require a quantity of
+albatrosses and mollyhawks every twenty-four hours, while they can fish
+only in the daylight.
+
+As the day wore along I improved on my obstructive tactics.  When the
+_Elsinore_ was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found
+that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could
+swing her bow off.  Then, when she had paid off till the wind was abeam,
+by reversing the wheel hard across to the opposite hard-over I could take
+advantage of her momentum away from the wind and work her off squarely
+before it.  This made all the wood-floated triangles of bird-snares tow
+aft along her sides.
+
+The first time I was ready for them.  With hooks and sinkers on our own
+lines aft, we tossed out, grappled, captured, and broke off nine of their
+lines.  But the next time, so slow is the movement of so large a ship,
+the mutineers hauled all their lines safely inboard ere they towed aft
+within striking distance of my grapnels.
+
+Still I improved.  As long as I kept the _Elsinore_ before the wind they
+could not fish.  I experimented.  Once before it, by means of a winged-
+out spanker coupled with patient and careful steering, I could keep her
+before it.  This I did, hour by hour one of my men relieving another at
+the wheel.  As a result all fishing ceased.
+
+Margaret was holding the first dog-watch, four to six.  Henry was at the
+wheel steering.  Wada and Louis were below cooking the evening meal over
+the big coal-stove and the oil-burners.  I had just come up from below
+and was standing beside the sounding-machine, not half a dozen feet from
+Henry at the wheel.  Some obscure sound from the ventilator must have
+attracted me, for I was gazing at it when the thing happened.
+
+But first, the ventilator.  This is a steel shaft that leads up from the
+coal-carrying bowels of the ship beneath the lazarette and that wins to
+the outside-world via the after-wall of the chart-house.  In fact, it
+occupies the hollow inside of the double walls of the afterwall of the
+chart-house.  Its opening, at the height of a man's head, is screened
+with iron bars so closely set that no mature-bodied rat can squeeze
+between.  Also, this opening commands the wheel, which is a scant fifteen
+feet away and directly across the booby-hatch.  Some mutineer, crawling
+along the space between the coal and the deck of the lower hold, had
+climbed the ventilator shaft and was able to take aim through the slits
+between the bars.
+
+Practically simultaneously, I saw the out-rush of smoke and heard the
+report.  I heard a grunt from Henry, and, turning my head, saw him cling
+to the spokes and turn the wheel half a revolution as he sank to the
+deck.  It must have been a lucky shot.  The boy was perforated through
+the heart or very near to the heart--we have no time for post-mortems on
+the _Elsinore_.
+
+Tom Spink and the second sail-maker, Uchino, sprang to Henry's side.  The
+revolver continued to go off through the ventilator slits, and the
+bullets thudded into the front of the half wheel-house all about them.
+Fortunately they were not hit, and they immediately scrambled out of
+range.  The boy quivered for the space of a few seconds, and ceased to
+move; and one more cadet of the perishing breed perished as he did his
+day's work at the wheel of the _Elsinore_ off the west coast of South
+America, bound from Baltimore to Seattle with a cargo of coal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+
+The situation is hopelessly grotesque.  We in the high place command the
+food of the _Elsinore_, but the mutineers have captured her
+steering-gear.  That is to say, they have captured it without coming into
+possession of it.  They cannot steer, neither can we.  The poop, which is
+the high place, is ours.  The wheel is on the poop, yet we cannot touch
+the wheel.  From that slitted opening in the ventilator-shaft they are
+able to shoot down any man who approaches the wheel.  And with that steel
+wall of the chart-house as a shield they laugh at us as from a conning
+tower.
+
+I have a plan, but it is not worth while putting into execution unless
+its need becomes imperative.  In the darkness of night it would be an
+easy trick to disconnect the steering-gear from the short tiller on the
+rudder-head, and then, by re-rigging the preventer tackles, steer from
+both sides of the poop well enough for'ard to be out of the range of the
+ventilator.
+
+In the meantime, in this fine weather, the _Elsinore_ drifts as she
+lists, or as the windage of her lists and the sea-movement of waves
+lists.  And she can well drift.  Let the mutineers starve.  They can best
+be brought to their senses through their stomachs.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And what are wits for, if not for use?  I am breaking the men's hungry
+hearts.  It is great fun in its way.  The mollyhawks and albatrosses,
+after their fashion, have followed the _Elsinore_ up out of their own
+latitudes.  This means that there are only so many of them and that their
+numbers are not recruited.  Syllogism: major premise, a definite and
+limited amount of bird-meat; minor premise, the only food the mutineers
+now have is bird-meat; conclusion, destroy the available food and the
+mutineers will be compelled to come back to duty.
+
+I have acted on this bit of logic.  I began experimentally by tossing
+small chunks of fat pork and crusts of stale bread overside.  When the
+birds descended for the feast I shot them.  Every carcass thus left
+floating on the surface of the sea was so much less meat for the
+mutineers.
+
+But I bettered the method.  Yesterday I overhauled the medicine-chest,
+and I dosed my chunks of fat pork and bread with the contents of every
+bottle that bore a label of skull and cross-bones.  I even added rough-on-
+rats to the deadliness of the mixture--this on the suggestion of the
+steward.
+
+And to-day, behold, there is no bird left in the sky.  True, while I
+played my game yesterday, the mutineers hooked a few of the birds; but
+now the rest are gone, and that is bound to be the last food for the men
+for'ard until they resume duty.
+
+Yes; it is grotesque.  It is a boy's game.  It reads like Midshipman
+Easy, like Frank Mildmay, like Frank Reade, Jr.; and yet, i' faith, life
+and death's in the issue.  I have just gone over the toll of our dead
+since the voyage began.
+
+First, was Christian Jespersen, killed by O'Sullivan when that maniac
+aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay's sea-boots; then O'Sullivan, because
+he interfered with Charles Davis' sleep, brained by that worthy with a
+steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we began the passage
+of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly by the gangster clique, his life cut
+out of him with knives, his carcass left lying on deck to be found by us
+and be buried by us; and the Samurai, Captain West, a sudden though not a
+violent death, albeit occurring in the midst of all elemental violence as
+Mr. Pike clawed the _Elsinore_ off the lee-shore of the Horn; and Boney
+the Splinter, following, washed overboard to drown as we cleared the sea-
+gashing rock-tooth where the southern tip of the continent bit into the
+storm-wrath of the Antarctic; and the big-footed, clumsy youth of a
+Finnish carpenter, hove overside as a Jonah by his fellows who believed
+that Finns control the winds; and Mike Cipriani and Bill Quigley, Rome
+and Ireland, shot down on the poop and flung overboard alive by Mr. Pike,
+still alive and clinging to the log-line, cut adrift by the steward to be
+eaten alive by great-beaked albatrosses, mollyhawks, and sooty-plumaged
+Cape hens; Steve Roberts, one-time cowboy, shot by me as he tried to
+shoot me; Herman Lunkenheimer, his throat cut before all of us by the
+hound Bombini as Kid Twist stretched the throat taut from behind; the two
+mates, Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in what
+must have been an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by
+Wada as he charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to
+rush the poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at
+the wheel, from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his day's work.
+
+No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just made I
+see that we are not playing a boy's game.  Why, we have lost a third of
+us, and the bloodiest battles of history have rarely achieved such a
+percentage of mortality.  Fourteen of us have gone overside, and who can
+tell the end?
+
+Nevertheless, here we are, masters of matter, adventurers in the micro-
+organic, planet-weighers, sun-analysers, star-rovers, god-dreamers,
+equipped with the human wisdom of all the ages, and yet, quoting Mr.
+Pike, to come down to brass tacks, we are a lot of primitive beasts,
+fighting bestially, slaying bestially, pursuing bestially food and water,
+air for our lungs, a dry space above the deep, and carcasses skin-covered
+and intact.  And over this menagerie of beasts Margaret and I, with our
+Asiatics under us, rule top-dog.  We are all dogs--there is no getting
+away from it.  And we, the fair-pigmented ones, by the seed of our
+ancestry rulers in the high place, shall remain top-dog over the rest of
+the dogs.  Oh, there is material in plenty for the cogitation of any
+philosopher on a windjammer in mutiny in this Year of our Lord 1913.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Henry was the fourteenth of us to go overside into the dark and salty
+disintegration of the sea.  And in one day he has been well avenged; for
+two of the mutineers have followed him.  The steward called my attention
+to what was taking place.  He touched my arm half beyond his servant's
+self, as he gloated for'ard at the men heaving two corpses overside.
+Weighted with coal, they sank immediately, so that we could not identify
+them.
+
+"They have been fighting," I said.  "It is good that they should fight
+among themselves."
+
+But the old Chinese merely grinned and shook his head.
+
+"You don't think they have been fighting?" I queried.
+
+"No fight.  They eat'm mollyhawk and albatross; mollyhawk and albatross
+eat'm fat pork; two men he die, plenty men much sick, you bet, damn to
+hell me very much glad.  I savve."
+
+And I think he was right.  While I was busy baiting the sea-birds the
+mutineers were catching them, and of a surety they must have caught some
+that had eaten of my various poisons.
+
+The two poisoned ones went over the side yesterday.  Since then we have
+taken the census.  Two men only have not appeared, and they are Bob, the
+fat and overgrown feebling youth, and, of all creatures, the Faun.  It
+seems my fate that I had to destroy the Faun--the poor, tortured Faun,
+always willing and eager, ever desirous to please.  There is a madness of
+ill luck in all this.  Why couldn't the two dead men have been Charles
+Davis and Tony the Greek?  Or Bert Rhine and Kid Twist? or Bombini and
+Andy Fay?  Yes, and in my heart I know I should have felt better had it
+been Isaac Chantz and Arthur Deacon, or Nancy and Sundry Buyers, or
+Shorty and Larry.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The steward has just tendered me a respectful bit of advice.
+
+"Next time we chuck'm overboard like Henry, much better we use old iron."
+
+"Getting short of coal?" I asked.
+
+He nodded affirmation.  We use a great deal of coal in our cooking, and
+when the present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a bulkhead
+to get at the cargo.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+
+The situation grows tense.  There are no more sea-birds, and the
+mutineers are starving.  Yesterday I talked with Bert Rhine.  To-day I
+talked with him again, and he will never forget, I am certain, the little
+talk we had this morning.
+
+To begin with, last evening, at five o'clock, I heard his voice issuing
+from between the slits of the ventilator in the after-wall of the chart-
+house.  Standing at the corner of the house, quite out of range, I
+answered him.
+
+"Getting hungry?" I jeered.  "Let me tell you what we are going to have
+for dinner.  I have just been down and seen the preparations.  Now,
+listen: first, caviare on toast; then, clam bouillon; and creamed
+lobster; and tinned lamb chops with French peas--you know, the peas that
+melt in one's mouth; and California asparagus with mayonnaise; and--oh, I
+forgot to mention fried potatoes and cold pork and beans; and peach pie;
+and coffee, real coffee.  Doesn't it make you hungry for your East Side?
+And, say, think of the free lunch going to waste right now in a thousand
+saloons in good old New York."
+
+I had told him the truth.  The dinner I described (principally coming out
+of tins and bottles, to be sure) was the dinner we were to eat.
+
+"Cut that," he snarled.  "I want to talk business with _you_."
+
+"Right down to brass tacks," I gibed.  "Very well, when are you and the
+rest of your rats going to turn to?"
+
+"Cut that," he reiterated.  "I've got you where 1 want you now.  Take it
+from me, I'm givin' it straight.  I'm not tellin' you how, but I've got
+you under my thumb.  When I come down on you, you'll crack."
+
+"Hell is full of cocksure rats like you," I retorted; although I never
+dreamed how soon he would be writhing in the particular hell preparing
+for him.
+
+"Forget it," he sneered back.  "I've got you where I want you.  I'm just
+tellin' you, that's all."
+
+"Pardon me," I replied, "when I tell you that I'm from Missouri.  You'll
+have to show _me_."
+
+And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I naturally
+sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to make myself
+intelligible to him.  The situation was bestial, with sixteen of our
+complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I employed,
+perforce, were terms of bestiality.  And I thought, also, of I who was
+thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the utopians, the visions of the
+poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in a discussion with this
+ripened product of the New York City inferno.  To him I must talk in the
+elemental terms of life and death, of food and water, of brutality and
+cruelty.
+
+"I give you your choice," he went on.  "Give in now, an' you won't be
+hurt, none of you."
+
+"And if we don't?" I dared airily.
+
+"You'll be sorry you was ever born.  You ain't a mush-head, you've got a
+girl there that's stuck on you.  It's about time you think of her.  You
+ain't altogether a mutt.  You get my drive?"
+
+Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of all I
+had ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at Peking, and of
+the plans of the white men for their womenkind in the event of the yellow
+hordes breaking through the last lines of defence.  Ay, and the old
+steward got it; for I saw his black eyes glint murderously in their
+narrow, tilted slits.  He knew the drift of the gangster's meaning.
+
+"You get my drive?" the gangster repeated.
+
+And I knew anger.  Not ordinary anger, but cold anger.  And I caught a
+vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the ages in
+all lands, on all seas.  I saw my kind, our women with us, in forlorn
+hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in jungle
+fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking ships.  And
+always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts.  We might die, our
+women with us; but, living, we had ruled.  It was a royal vision I
+glimpsed.  Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the ethic, which was the
+stuff of the fabric of which it was builded.  It was the sacred trust of
+the seed, the bequest of duty handed down from all ancestors.
+
+And I flamed more coldly.  It was not red-brute anger.  It was
+intellectual.  It was based on concept and history; it was the philosophy
+of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in their own
+strength.  Now at last I knew Nietzsche.  I knew the rightness of the
+books, the relation of high thinking to high-conduct, the transmutation
+of midnight thought into action in the high place on the poop of a coal-
+carrier in the year nineteen-thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors
+behind me, my slant-eyed servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and
+beneath the heel of me.  God!  I felt kingly.  I knew at last the meaning
+of kingship.
+
+My anger was white and cold.  This subterranean rat of a miserable human,
+crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and mine!  A rat
+in the shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-like as any rat
+ever made!  And it was in this spirit that I answered the gangster.
+
+"When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad light of
+day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience, and when you
+show by your every action that you like it and are glad to do it, then,
+and not until then, will I talk with you."
+
+Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate of
+his kind at me through the slits in the ventilator.  But I made no reply.
+I listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew why the
+English had blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of cannon in
+India long years ago.
+
+* * * * *
+
+And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-gallon
+carboy of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended for it.
+
+In the meantime I was devising another way to overcome that deadly
+ventilator shaft.  The scheme was so simple that I was shamed in that it
+had not occurred to me at the very beginning.  The slitted opening was
+small.  Two sacks of flour, in a wooden frame, suspended by ropes from
+the edge of the chart-house roof directly above, would effectually cover
+the opening and block all revolver fire.
+
+No sooner thought than done.  Tom Spink and Louis were on top the chart-
+house with me and preparing to lower the flour, when we heard a voice
+issuing from the shaft.
+
+"Who's in there now?" I demanded.  "Speak up."
+
+"I'm givin' you a last chance," Bert Rhine answered.
+
+And just then, around the corner of the house, stepped the steward.  In
+his hand he carried a large galvanized pail, and my casual thought was
+that he had come to get rain-water from the barrels.  Even as I thought
+it, he made a sweeping half-circle with the pail and sloshed its contents
+into the ventilator-opening.  And even as the liquid flew through the air
+I knew it for what it was--undiluted sulphuric acid, two gallons of it
+from the carboy.
+
+The gangster must have received the liquid fire in the face and eyes.
+And, in the shock of pain, he must have released all holds and fallen
+upon the coal at the bottom of the shaft.  His cries and shrieks of
+anguish were terrible, and I was reminded of the starving rats which had
+squealed up that same shaft during the first months of the voyage.  The
+thing was sickening.  I prefer that men be killed cleanly and easily.
+
+The agony of the wretch I did not fully realize until the steward, his
+bare fore-arms sprayed by the splash from the ventilator slats, suddenly
+felt the bite of the acid through his tight, whole skin and made a mad
+rush for the water-barrel at the corner of the house.  And Bert Rhine,
+the silent man of soundless laughter, screaming below there on the coal,
+was enduring the bite of the acid in his eyes!
+
+We covered the ventilator opening with our flour-device; the screams from
+below ceased as the victim was evidently dragged for'ard across the coal
+by his mates; and yet I confess to a miserable forenoon.  As Carlyle has
+said: "Death is easy; all men must die"; but to receive two gallons of
+full-strength sulphuric acid full in the face is a vastly different and
+vastly more horrible thing than merely to die.  Fortunately, Margaret was
+below at the time, and, after a few minutes, in which I recovered my
+balance, I bullied and swore all our hands into keeping the happening
+from her.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Oh, well, and we have got ours in retaliation.  Off and on, through all
+of yesterday, after the ventilator tragedy, there were noises beneath the
+cabin floor or deck.  We heard them under the dining-table, under the
+steward's pantry, under Margaret's stateroom.
+
+This deck is overlaid with wood, but under the wood is iron, or steel
+rather, such as of which the whole _Elsinore_ is builded.
+
+Margaret and I, followed by Louis, Wada, and the steward, walked about
+from place to place, wherever the sounds arose of tappings and of cold-
+chisels against iron.  The tappings seemed to come from everywhere; but
+we concluded that the concentration necessary on any spot to make an
+opening large enough for a man's body would inevitably draw our attention
+to that spot.  And, as Margaret said:
+
+"If they do manage to cut through, they must come up head-first, and, in
+such emergence, what chance would they have against us?"
+
+So I relieved Buckwheat from deck duty, placed him on watch over the
+cabin floor, to be relieved by the steward in Margaret's watches.
+
+In the late afternoon, after prodigious hammerings and clangings in a
+score of places, all noises ceased.  Neither in the first and second dog-
+watches, nor in the first watch of the night, were the noises resumed.
+When I took charge of the poop at midnight Buckwheat relieved the steward
+in the vigil over the cabin floor; and as I leaned on the rail at the
+break of the poop, while my four hours dragged slowly by, least of all
+did I apprehend danger from the cabin--especially when I considered the
+two-gallon pail of raw sulphuric acid ready to hand for the first head
+that might arise through an opening in the floor not yet made.  Our
+rascals for'ard might scale the poop; or cross aloft from mizzenmast to
+jigger and descend upon our heads; but how they could invade us through
+the floor was beyond me.
+
+But they did invade.  A modern ship is a complex affair.  How was I to
+guess the manner of the invasion?
+
+It was two in the morning, and for an hour I had been puzzling my head
+with watching the smoke arise from the after-division of the
+for'ard-house and with wondering why the mutineers should have up steam
+in the donkey-engine at such an ungodly hour.  Not on the whole voyage
+had the donkey-engine been used.  Four bells had just struck, and I was
+leaning on the rail at the break of the poop when I heard a prodigious
+coughing and choking from aft.  Next, Wada ran across the deck to me.
+
+"Big trouble with Buckwheat," he blurted at me.  "You go quick."
+
+I shoved him my rifle and left him on guard while I raced around the
+chart-house.  A lighted match, in the hands of Tom Spink, directed me.
+Between the booby-hatch and the wheel, sitting up and rocking back and
+forth with wringings of hands and wavings of arms, tears of agony
+bursting from his eyes, was Buckwheat.  My first thought was that in some
+stupid way he had got the acid into his own eyes.  But the terrible
+fashion in which he coughed and strangled would quickly have undeceived
+me, had not Louis, bending over the booby-companion, uttered a startled
+exclamation.
+
+I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made me
+catch my breath and gasp.  I had inhaled sulphur.  On the instant I
+forgot the _Elsinore_, the mutineers for'ard, everything save one thing.
+
+The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily about
+the big after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and strangled me.  By
+the dim light of a sea-lantern I saw the old steward, on hands and knees,
+coughing and gasping, the while he shook awake Yatsuda, the first sail-
+maker.  Uchino, the second sail-maker, still strangled in his sleep.
+
+It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I proved
+it when I dropped on my hands and knees.  I rolled Uchino out of his
+blankets with a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my head, face, and
+mouth, arose to my feet, and dashed for'ard into the hall.  After a
+couple of collisions with the wood-work I again dropped to the floor and
+rearranged the blankets so that, while my mouth remained covered, I could
+draw or withdraw, a thickness across my eyes.
+
+The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the
+dizziness I suffered.  I blundered into the steward's pantry, and out of
+it, missed the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard opening in
+the long hall, and found myself bent double by violent collision with the
+dining-room table.
+
+But I had my bearings.  Feeling my way around the table and bumping most
+of the poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied stove, I
+emerged in the cross-hall and made my way to starboard.  Here, at the
+base of the chart-room stairway, I gained the hall that led aft.  By this
+time my own situation seemed so serious that, careless of any collision,
+I went aft in long leaps.
+
+Margaret's door was open.  I plunged into her room.  The moment I drew
+the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a modicum of what
+Bert Rhine must have suffered.  Oh, the intolerable bite of the sulphur
+in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain!  No light burned in the room.  I
+could only strangle and stumble for'ard to Margaret's bed, upon which I
+collapsed.
+
+She was not there.  I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her
+body had left in the under-sheet.  Even in my agony and helplessness the
+intimacy of that warmth her body had left was very dear to me.  Between
+the lack of oxygen in my lungs (due to the blankets), the pain of the
+sulphur, and the mortal dizziness in my brain, I felt that I might well
+cease there where the linen warmed my hand.
+
+Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing from
+along the hall.  It was new life to me.  I fell from bed to floor and
+managed to get upright until I gained the hall, where again I fell.
+Thereafter I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the stairway.  By
+means of the newel-post I drew myself upright and listened.  Near me
+something moved and strangled.  I fell upon it and found in my arms all
+the softness of Margaret.
+
+How describe that battle up the stairway?  It was a crucifixion of
+struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony.  Time after time, as my
+consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort and
+let myself blur down into the ultimate dark.  I fought my way step by
+step.  Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her body step by
+step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell with it, and back
+with it, and lost much that had been so hardly gained.  And yet out of it
+all this I remember: that warm soft body of hers was the dearest thing in
+the world--vastly more dear than the pleasant land I remotely remembered,
+than all the books and all the humans I had ever known, than the deck
+above, with its sweet pure air softly blowing under the cool starry sky.
+
+As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of leaving
+her there and saving myself never crossed my mind.  The one place for me
+was where she was.
+
+Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not absurd
+during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway.  One must taste
+death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive sanction for
+purple passages.
+
+And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed that
+upward way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out upon the
+poop might not be shut.  Life and death lay right there in that one point
+of the issue.  Was there any creature of my creatures aft with common
+sense and anticipation sufficient to make him think to open those doors?
+How I yearned for one man, for one proved henchman, such as Mr. Pike, to
+be on the poop!  As it was, with the sole exception of Tom Spink and
+Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.
+
+I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my
+feet.  Nor could I rise upright on my knees.  I crawled like any four-
+legged animal--nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the deck.  It
+was a matter of several feet to the doorway.  I died a score of times in
+those several feet; but ever I endured the agony of resurrection and
+dragged Margaret with me.  Sometimes the full strength I could exert did
+not move her, and I lay with her and coughed and strangled my way through
+to another resurrection.
+
+And the door was open.  The doors to starboard and to port were both
+open; and as the _Elsinore_ rolled a draught through the chart-house hall
+my lungs filled with pure, cool air.  As I drew myself across the high
+threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I heard the
+cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver.  And, ere I fainted
+into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone so beyond endurance
+that it had achieved its own anaesthesia, I glimpsed, dream-like and
+distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail, dark forms that cut and
+thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-mast brightly lighted by our
+illuminators.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop.  My five Asiatics and two
+white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay unconscious side
+by side.
+
+The whole affair was very simple.  Modern maritime quarantine demands
+that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers.  In
+the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a complete fumigating
+apparatus.  The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the pipes aft
+across the coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of steel and
+wood under the cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump.  Buckwheat had
+fallen asleep and been awakened by the strangling sulphur fumes.  We in
+the high place had been smoked out by our rascals like so many rats.
+
+It was Wada who had opened one of the doors.  The old steward had opened
+the other.  Together they had attempted the descent of the stairway and
+been driven back by the fumes.  Then they had engaged in the struggle to
+repel the rush from for'ard.
+
+Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves the
+lungs sore.  Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we draw breath
+in anything that resembles comfort.  But still my lungs were not so sore
+as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she meant to me.  And yet
+she is only a woman--I tell her so; I tell her that there are at least
+seven hundred and fifty millions of two-legged, long-haired,
+gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like her on the planet, and
+that she is really swamped by the immensity of numbers of her sex and
+kind.  But I tell her something more.  I tell her that of all of them she
+is the only one.  And, better yet, to myself and for myself, I believe
+it.  I know it.  The last least part of me and all of me proclaims it.
+
+Love _is_ wonderful.  It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement.  Oh,
+trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and
+calculating and classifying love.  It is a profound foolishness, a cosmic
+trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher--yes, and of
+the futurist.  But when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots and
+becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover, then all he may do,
+and which is what he cannot help doing, is to yield to the compulsions of
+being and throw both his arms around love and hold it closer to him than
+is his own heart close to him.  This is the summit of his life, and of
+man's life.  Higher than this no man may rise.  The philosophers toil and
+struggle on mole-hill peaks far below.  He who has not loved has not
+tasted the ultimate sweet of living.  I know.  I love Margaret, a woman.
+She is desirable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+
+In the past twenty-four hours many things have happened.  To begin with,
+we nearly lost the steward in the second dog-watch last evening.  Through
+the slits in the ventilator some man thrust a knife into the sacks of
+flour and cut them wide open from top to bottom.  In the dark the flour
+poured to the deck unobserved.
+
+Of course, the man behind could not see through the screen of empty
+sacks, but he took a blind pot-shot at point-blank range when the steward
+went by, slip-sloppily dragging the heels of his slippers.  Fortunately
+it was a miss, but so close a miss was it that his cheek and neck were
+burned with powder grains.
+
+At six bells in the first watch came another surprise.  Tom Spink came to
+me where I stood guard at the for'ard end of the poop.  His voice shook
+as he spoke.
+
+"For the love of God, sir, they've come," he said.
+
+"Who?" I asked sharply.
+
+"Them," he chattered.  "The ones that come aboard off the Horn, sir, the
+three drownded sailors.  They're there, aft, sir, the three of 'em,
+standin' in a row by the wheel."
+
+"How did they get there?"
+
+"Bein' warlocks, they flew, sir.  You didn't see 'm go by you, did you,
+sir?"
+
+"No," I admitted.  "They never went by me."
+
+Poor Tom Spink groaned.
+
+"But there are lines aloft there on which they could cross over from
+mizzen to jigger," I added.  "Send Wada to me."
+
+When the latter relieved me I went aft.  And there in a row were our
+three pale-haired storm-waifs with the topaz eyes.  In the light of a
+bull's-eye, held on them by Louis, their eyes never seemed more like the
+eyes of great cats.  And, heavens, they purred!  At least, the
+inarticulate noises they made sounded more like purring than anything
+else.  That these sounds meant friendliness was very evident.  Also, they
+held out their hands, palms upward, in unmistakable sign of peace.  Each
+in turn doffed his cap and placed my hand for a moment on his head.
+Without doubt this meant their offer of fealty, their acceptance of me as
+master.
+
+I nodded my head.  There was nothing to be said to men who purred like
+cats, while sign-language in the light of the bull's-eye was rather
+difficult.  Tom Spink groaned protest when I told Louis to take them
+below and give them blankets.
+
+I made the sleep-sign to them, and they nodded gratefully, hesitated,
+then pointed to their mouths and rubbed their stomachs.
+
+"Drowned men do not eat," I laughed to Tom Spink.  "Go down and watch
+them.  Feed them up, Louis, all they want.  It's a good sign of short
+rations for'ard."
+
+At the end of half an hour Tom Spink was back.
+
+"Well, did they eat?" I challenged him.
+
+But he was unconvinced.  The very quantity they had eaten was a
+suspicious thing, and, further, he had heard of a kind of ghost that
+devoured dead bodies in graveyards.  Therefore, he concluded, mere non-
+eating was no test for a ghost.
+
+The third event of moment occurred this morning at seven o'clock.  The
+mutineers called for a truce; and when Nosey Murphy, the Maltese Cockney,
+and the inevitable Charles Davis stood beneath me on the main deck, their
+faces showed lean and drawn.  Famine had been my great ally.  And in
+truth, with Margaret beside me in that high place of the break of the
+poop, as I looked down on the hungry wretches I felt very strong.  Never
+had the inequality of numbers fore and aft been less than now.  The three
+deserters, added to our own nine, made twelve of us, while the mutineers,
+after subtracting Ditman Olansen, Bob and the Faun, totalled only an even
+score.  And of these Bert Rhine must certainly be in a bad way, while
+there were many weaklings, such as Sundry Buyers, Nancy, Larry, and Lars
+Jacobsen.
+
+"Well, what do you want?" I demanded.  "I haven't much time to waste.
+Breakfast is ready and waiting."
+
+Charles Davis started to speak, but I shut him off.
+
+"I'll have nothing out of you, Davis.  At least not now.  Later on, when
+I'm in that court of law you've bothered me with for half the voyage,
+you'll get your turn at talking.  And when that time comes don't forget
+that I shall have a few words to say."
+
+Again he began, but this time was stopped by Nosey Murphy.
+
+"Aw, shut your trap, Davis," the gangster snarled, "or I'll shut it for
+you."  He glanced up to me.  "We want to go back to work, that's what we
+want."
+
+"Which is not the way to ask for it," I answered.
+
+"Sir," he added hastily.
+
+"That's better," I commented.
+
+"Oh, my God, sir, don't let 'm come aft."  Tom Spink muttered hurriedly
+in my ear.  "That'd be the end of all of us.  And even if they didn't get
+you an' the rest, they'd heave me over some dark night.  They ain't never
+goin' to forgive me, sir, for joinin' in with the afterguard."
+
+I ignored the interruption and addressed the gangster.
+
+"There's nothing like going to work when you want to as badly as you seem
+to.  Suppose all hands get sail on her just to show good intention."
+
+"We'd like to eat first, sir," he objected.
+
+"I'd like to see you setting sail, first," was my reply.  "And you may as
+well get it from me straight that what I like goes, aboard this ship."--I
+almost said "hooker."
+
+Nosey Murphy hesitated and looked to the Maltese Cockney for counsel.  The
+latter debated, as if gauging the measure of his weakness while he stared
+aloft at the work involved.  Finally he nodded.
+
+"All right, sir," the gangster spoke up.  "We'll do it . . . but can't
+something be cookin' in the galley while we're doin' it?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"I didn't have that in mind, and I don't care to change my mind now.  When
+every sail is stretched and every yard braced, and all that mess of gear
+cleared up, food for a good meal will be served out.  You needn't bother
+about the spanker nor the mizzen-braces.  We'll make your work lighter by
+that much."
+
+In truth, as they climbed aloft they showed how miserably weak they were.
+There were some too feeble to go aloft.  Poor Sundry Buyers continually
+pressed his abdomen as he toiled around the deck-capstans; and never was
+Nancy's face quite so forlorn as when he obeyed the Maltese Cockney's
+command and went up to loose the mizzen-skysail.
+
+In passing, I must note one delicious miracle that was worked before our
+eyes.  They were hoisting the mizzen-upper-topsail-yard by means of one
+of the patent deck-capstans.  Although they had reversed the gear so as
+to double the purchase, they were having a hard time of it.  Lars
+Jacobsen was limping on his twice-broken leg, and with him were Sundry
+Buyers, Tony the Greek, Bombini, and Mulligan Jacobs.  Nosey Murphy held
+the turn.
+
+When they stopped from sheer exhaustion Murphy's glance chanced to fall
+on Charles Davis, the one man who had not worked since the outset of the
+voyage and who was not working now.
+
+"Bear a hand, Davis," the gangster called.
+
+Margaret gurgled low laughter in my ear as she caught the drift of the
+episode.
+
+The sea-lawyer looked at the other in amazement ere he answered:
+
+"I guess not."
+
+After nodding Sundry Buyers over to him to take the turn Murphy
+straightened his back and walked close to Davis, then said very quietly:
+
+"I guess yes."
+
+That was all.  For a space neither spoke.  Davis seemed to be giving the
+matter judicial consideration.  The men at the capstan panted, rested,
+and looked on--all save Bombini, who slunk across the deck until he stood
+at Murphy's shoulder.
+
+Under such circumstances the decision Charles Davis gave was eminently
+the right one, although even then he offered a compromise.
+
+"I'll hold the turn," he volunteered.
+
+"You'll lump around one of them capstan-bars," Murphy said.
+
+The sea-lawyer made no mistake.  He knew in all absoluteness that he was
+choosing between life and death, and he limped over to the capstan and
+found his place.  And as the work started, and as he toiled around and
+around the narrow circle, Margaret and I shamelessly and loudly laughed
+our approval.  And our own men stole for'ard along the poop to peer down
+at the spectacle of Charles Davis at work.
+
+All of which must have pleased Nosey Murphy, for, as he continued to hold
+the turn and coil down, he kept a critical eye on Davis.
+
+"More juice, Davis!" he commanded with abrupt sharpness.
+
+And Davis, with a startle, visibly increased his efforts.
+
+This was too much for our fellows, who, Asiatics and all, applauded with
+laughter and hand-clapping.  And what could I do?  It was a gala day, and
+our faithful ones deserved some little recompense of amusement.  So I
+ignored the breach of discipline and of poop etiquette by strolling away
+aft with Margaret.
+
+At the wheel was one of our storm-waifs.  I set the course due east for
+Valparaiso, and sent the steward below to bring up sufficient food for
+one substantial meal for the mutineers.
+
+"When do we get our next grub, sir?" Nosey Murphy asked, as the steward
+served the supplies down to him from the poop.
+
+"At midday," I answered.  "And as long as you and your gang are good,
+you'll get your grub three times each day.  You can choose your own
+watches any way you please.  But the ship's work must be done, and done
+properly.  If it isn't, then the grub stops.  That will do.  Now go
+for'ard."
+
+"One thing more, sir," he said quickly.  "Bert Rhine is awful bad.  He
+can't see, sir.  It looks like he's going to lose his face.  He can't
+sleep.  He groans all the time."
+
+* * * * *
+
+It was a busy day.  I made a selection of things from the medicine-chest
+for the acid-burned gangster; and, finding that Murphy knew how to
+manipulate a hypodermic syringe, entrusted him with one.
+
+Then, too, I practised with the sextant and think I fairly caught the sun
+at noon and correctly worked up the observation.  But this is latitude,
+and is comparatively easy.  Longitude is more difficult.  But I am
+reading up on it.
+
+All afternoon a gentle northerly fan of air snored the _Elsinore_ through
+the water at a five-knot clip, and our course lay east for land, for the
+habitations of men, for the law and order that men institute whenever
+they organize into groups.  Once in Valparaiso, with police flag flying,
+our mutineers will be taken care of by the shore authorities.
+
+Another thing I did was to rearrange our watches aft so as to split up
+the three storm-visitors.  Margaret took one in her watch, along with the
+two sail-makers, Tom Spink, and Louis.  Louis is half white, and all
+trustworthy, so that, at all times, on deck or below, he is told off to
+the task of never letting the topaz-eyed one out of his sight.
+
+In my watch are the steward, Buckwheat, Wada, and the other two topaz-
+eyed ones.  And to one of them Wada is told off; and to the other is
+assigned the steward.  We are not taking any chances.  Always, night and
+day, on duty or off, these storm-strangers will have one of our proved
+men watching them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Yes; and I tried the stranger men out last evening.  It was after a
+council with Margaret.  She was sure, and I agreed with her, that the men
+for'ard are not blindly yielding to our bringing them in to be prisoners
+in Valparaiso.  As we tried to forecast it, their plan is to desert the
+_Elsinore_ in the boats as soon as we fetch up with the land.  Also,
+considering some of the bitter lunatic spirits for'ard, there would be a
+large chance of their drilling the _Elsinore's_ steel sides and scuttling
+her ere they took to the boats.  For scuttling a ship is surely as
+ancient a practice as mutiny on the high seas.
+
+So it was, at one in the morning, that I tried out our strangers.  Two of
+them I took for'ard with me in the raid on the small boats.  One I left
+beside Margaret, who kept charge of the poop.  On the other side of him
+stood the steward with his big hacking knife.  By signs I had made it
+clear to him, and to his two comrades who were to accompany me for'ard,
+that at the first sign of treachery he would be killed.  And not only did
+the old steward, with signs emphatic and unmistakable, pledge himself to
+perform the execution, but we were all convinced that he was eager for
+the task.
+
+With Margaret I also left Buckwheat and Tom Spink.  Wada, the two sail-
+makers, Louis, and the two topaz-eyed ones accompanied me.  In addition
+to fighting weapons we were armed with axes.  We crossed the main deck
+unobserved, gained the bridge by way of the 'midship-house, and by way of
+the bridge gained the top of the for'ard-house.  Here were the first
+boats we began work on; but, first of all, I called in the lookout from
+the forecastle-head.
+
+He was Mulligan Jacobs; and he picked his way back across the wreck of
+the bridge where the fore-topgallant-yard still lay, and came up to me
+unafraid, as implacable and bitter as ever.
+
+"Jacobs," I whispered, "you are to stay here beside me until we finish
+the job of smashing the boats.  Do you get that?"
+
+"As though it could fright me," he growled all too loudly.  "Go ahead for
+all I care.  I know your game.  And I know the game of the hell's maggots
+under our feet this minute.  'Tis they that'd desert in the boats.  'Tis
+you that'll smash the boats an' jail 'm kit an' crew."
+
+"S-s-s-h," I vainly interpolated.
+
+"What of it?" he went on as loudly as ever.  "They're sleepin' with full
+bellies.  The only night watch we keep is the lookout.  Even Rhine's
+asleep.  A few jolts of the needle has put a clapper to his eternal
+moanin'.  Go on with your work.  Smash the boats.  'Tis nothin' I care.
+'Tis well I know my own crooked back is worth more to me than the necks
+of the scum of the world below there."
+
+"If you felt that way, why didn't you join us?" I queried.
+
+"Because I like you no better than them an' not half so well.  They are
+what you an' your fathers have made 'em.  An' who in hell are you an'
+your fathers?  Robbers of the toil of men.  I like them little.  I like
+you and your fathers not at all.  Only I like myself and me crooked back
+that's a livin' proof there ain't no God and makes Browning a liar."
+
+"Join us now," I urged, meeting him in his mood.  "It will be easier for
+your back."
+
+"To hell with you," was his answer.  "Go ahead an' smash the boats.  You
+can hang some of them.  But you can't touch me with the law.  'Tis me
+that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand
+against any man--a feather blown about by the windy contention of men
+strong in their back an' brainless in their heads."
+
+"As you please," I said.
+
+"As I can't help pleasin'," he retorted, "bein' what I am an' so made for
+the little flash between the darknesses which men call life.  Now why
+couldn't I a-ben a butterfly, or a fat pig in a full trough, or a mere
+mortal man with a straight back an' women to love me?  Go on an' smash
+the boats.  Play hell to the top of your bent.  Like me, you'll end in
+the darkness.  And your darkness'll be--as dark as mine."
+
+"A full belly puts the spunk back into you," I sneered.
+
+"'Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid.  Go
+on an' smash the boats."
+
+"Whose idea was the sulphur?" I asked.
+
+"I'm not tellin' you the man, but I envied him until it showed failure.
+An' whose idea was it--to douse the sulphuric into Rhine's face?  He'll
+lose that same face, from the way it's shedding."
+
+"Nor will I tell you," I said.  "Though I will tell you that I am glad
+the idea was not mine."
+
+"Oh, well," he muttered cryptically, "different customs on different
+ships, as the cook said when he went for'ard to cast off the spanker
+sheet."
+
+Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time to
+work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea.  Mulligan
+Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he not been
+born crooked with a crooked back.
+
+And we smashed the boats.  With axes and sledges it was an easier task
+than I had imagined.  On top of both houses we left the boats masses of
+splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most energetically; and
+we regained the poop without a shot being fired.  The forecastle turned
+out, of course, at our noise, but made no attempt to interfere with us.
+
+And right here I register another complaint against the sea-novelists.  A
+score of men for'ard, desperate all, with desperate deeds behind them,
+and jail and the gallows facing them not many days away, should have only
+begun to fight.  And yet this score of men did nothing while we destroyed
+their last chance for escape.
+
+"But where did they get the grub?" the steward asked me afterwards.
+
+This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr. Pike
+began cudgelling his brains over it.  I wonder, had I asked Mulligan
+Jacobs the question, if he would have told me?  At any rate, in court at
+Valparaiso that question will be answered.  In the meantime I suppose I
+shall submit to having the steward ask me it daily.
+
+"It is murder and mutiny on the high seas," I told them this morning,
+when they came aft in a body to complain about the destruction of the
+boats and to demand my intentions.
+
+And as I looked down upon the poor wretches from the break of the poop,
+standing there in the high place, the vision of my kind down all its mad,
+violent, and masterful past was strong upon me.  Already, since our
+departure from Baltimore, three other men, masters, had occupied this
+high place and gone their way--the Samurai, Mr. Pike, and Mr. Mellaire.  I
+stood here, fourth, no seaman, merely a master by the blood of my
+ancestors; and the work of the _Elsinore_ in the world went on.
+
+Bert Rhine, his head and face swathed in bandages, stood there beneath
+me, and I felt for him a tingle of respect.  He, too, in a subterranean,
+ghetto way was master over his rats.  Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist stood
+shoulder to shoulder with their stricken gangster leader.  It was his
+will, because of his terrible injury, to get in to land and doctors as
+quickly as possible.  He preferred taking his chance in court against the
+chance of losing his life, or, perhaps, his eyesight.
+
+The crew was divided against itself; and Isaac Chantz, the Jew, his
+wounded shoulder with a hunch to it, seemed to lead the revolt against
+the gangsters.  His wound was enough to convict him in any court, and
+well he knew it.  Beside him, and at his shoulders, clustered the Maltese
+Cockney, Andy Fay, Arthur Deacon, Frank Fitzgibbon, Richard Giller, and
+John Hackey.
+
+In another group, still allegiant to the gangsters, were men such as
+Shorty, Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, and Larry.  Charles Davis was
+prominently in the gangster group.  A fourth group was composed of Sundry
+Buyers, Nancy, and Tony the Greek.  This group was distinctly neutral.
+And, finally, unaffiliated, quite by himself, stood Mulligan
+Jacobs--listening, I fancy, to far echoes of ancient wrongs, and feeling,
+I doubt not, the bite of the iron-hot hooks in his brain.
+
+"What are you going to do with us, sir?" Isaac Chantz demanded of me, in
+defiance to the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.
+
+Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew's voice.  Chantz's
+partisans drew closer to him.
+
+"Jail you," I answered from above.  "And it shall go as hard with all of
+you as I can make it hard."
+
+"Maybe you will an' maybe you won't," the Jew retorted.
+
+"Shut up, Chantz!" Bert Rhine commanded.
+
+"And you'll get yours, you wop," Chantz snarled, "if I have to do it
+myself."
+
+I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have
+been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in
+observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to
+glimpse the tragedy into which it was culminating.
+
+"Bombini!" Bert Rhine said.
+
+His voice was imperative.  It was the order of a master to the dog at
+heel.  Bombini responded.  He drew his knife and started to advance upon
+the Jew.  But a deep rumbling, animal-like in its _sound_ and menace,
+arose in the throats of those about the Jew.
+
+Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader,
+whose face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not see.
+
+"'Tis a good deed--do it, Bombini," Charles Davis encouraged.
+
+"Shut your face, Davis!" came out from Bert Rhine's bandages.
+
+Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into Bombini's
+side, then covered the men about the Jew.
+
+Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian.  He was caught
+between the mill-stones, "Bombini, stick that Jew," Bert Rhine commanded.
+
+The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either side,
+Kid Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.
+
+"I cannot see him," Bert Rhine went on; "but by God I will see him!"
+
+And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the
+bandages.  The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement.  I
+saw the horror of his face, but the description of it is beyond the
+limits of any English I possess.  I was aware that Margaret, at my
+shoulder, gasped and shuddered.
+
+"Bombini!--stick him," the gangster repeated.  "And stick any man that
+raises a yap.  Murphy!  See that Bombini does his work."
+
+Murphy's knife was out and at the bravo's back.  Kid Twist covered the
+Jew's group with his revolver.  And the three advanced.
+
+It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed from
+dream to action.
+
+"Bombini!" I said sharply.
+
+He paused and looked up.
+
+"Stand where you are," I ordered, "till I do some talking.--Chantz!  Make
+no mistake.  Rhine is boss for'ard.  You take his orders . . . until we
+get into Valparaiso; then you'll take your chances along with him in
+jail.  In the meantime, what Rhine says goes.  Get that, and get it
+straight.  I am behind Rhine until the police come on board.--Bombini! do
+whatever Rhine tells you.  I'll shoot the man who tries to stop
+you.--Deacon!  Stand away from Chantz.  Go over to the fife-rail."
+
+All hands knew the stream of lead my automatic rifle could throw, and
+Arthur Deacon knew it.  He hesitated barely a moment, then obeyed.
+
+"Fitzgibbon!--Giller!--Hackey!" I called in turn, and was obeyed.  "Fay!"
+I called twice, ere the response came.
+
+Isaac Chantz stood alone, and Bombini now showed eagerness.
+
+"Chantz!" I said; "don't you think it would be healthier to go over to
+the fife-rail and be good?"
+
+He debated the matter not many seconds, resheathed his knife, and
+complied.
+
+The tang of power!  I was minded to let literature get the better of me
+and read the rascals a lecture; but thank heaven I had sufficient
+proportion and balance to refrain.
+
+"Rhine!" I said.
+
+He turned his corroded face up to me and blinked in an effort to see.
+
+"As long as Chantz takes your orders, leave him alone.  We'll need every
+hand to work the ship in.  As for yourself, send Murphy aft in half an
+hour and I'll give him the best the medicine-chest affords.  That is all.
+Go for'ard."
+
+And they shambled away, beaten and dispirited.
+
+"But that man--his face--what happened to him?" Margaret asked of me.
+
+Sad it is to end love with lies.  Sadder still is it to begin love with
+lies.  I had tried to hide this one happening from Margaret, and I had
+failed.  It could no longer be hidden save by lying; and so I told her
+the truth, told her how and why the gangster had had his face dashed with
+sulphuric acid by the old steward who knew white men and their ways.
+
+* * * * *
+
+There is little more to write.  The mutiny of the _Elsinore_ is over.  The
+divided crew is ruled by the gangsters, who are as intent on getting
+their leader into port as I am intent on getting all of them into jail.
+The first lap of the voyage of the _Elsinore_ draws to a close.  Two
+days, at most, with our present sailing, will bring us into Valparaiso.
+And then, as beginning a new voyage, the _Elsinore_ will depart for
+Seattle.
+
+* * * * *
+
+One thing more remains for me to write, and then this strange log of a
+strange cruise will be complete.  It happened only last night.  I am yet
+fresh from it, and athrill with it and with the promise of it.
+
+Margaret and I spent the last hour of the second dog-watch together at
+the break of the poop.  It was good again to feel the _Elsinore_ yielding
+to the wind-pressure on her canvas, to feel her again slipping and
+sliding through the water in an easy sea.
+
+Hidden by the darkness, clasped in each other's arms, we talked love and
+love plans.  Nor am I shamed to confess that I was all for immediacy.
+Once in Valparaiso, I contended, we would fit out the _Elsinore_ with
+fresh crew and officers and send her on her way.  As for us, steamers and
+rapid travelling would fetch us quickly home.  Furthermore, Valparaiso
+being a place where such things as licences and ministers obtained, we
+would be married ere we caught the fast steamers for home.
+
+But Margaret was obdurate.  The Wests had always stood by their ships,
+she urged; had always brought their ships in to the ports intended or had
+gone down with their ships in the effort.  The _Elsinore_ had cleared
+from Baltimore for Seattle with the Wests in the high place.  The
+_Elsinore_ would re-equip with officers and men in Valparaiso, and the
+_Elsinore_ would arrive in Seattle with a West still on board.
+
+"But think, dear heart," I objected.  "The voyage will require months.
+Remember what Henley has said: 'Every kiss we take or give leaves us less
+of life to live.'"
+
+She pressed her lips to mine.
+
+"We kiss," she said.
+
+But I was stupid.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Oh, the weary, weary months," I complained.  "You dear silly," she
+gurgled.  "Don't you understand?"
+
+"I understand only that it is many a thousand miles from Valparaiso to
+Seattle," I answered.
+
+"You won't understand," she challenged.
+
+"I am a fool," I admitted.  "I am aware of only one thing: I want you.  I
+want you."
+
+"You are a dear, but you are very, very stupid," she said, and as she
+spoke she caught my hand and pressed the palm of it against her cheek.
+"What do you feel?" she asked.
+
+"Hot cheeks--cheeks most hot."
+
+"I am blushing for what your stupidity compels me to say," she explained.
+"You have already said that such things as licences and ministers obtain
+in Valparaiso . . . and . . . and, well . . . "
+
+"You mean . . . ?" I stammered.
+
+"Just that," she confirmed.
+
+"The honeymoon shall be on the _Elsinore_ from Valparaiso all the way to
+Seattle?" I rattled on.
+
+"The many thousands of miles, the weary, weary months," she teased in my
+own intonations, until I stifled her teasing with my lips.
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Mutiny of the "Elsinore", by Jack London
+#88 in our series by Jack London
+
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+The Mutiny of the Elsinore
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+by Jack London
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+December, 2000 [Etext #2415]
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Mutiny of the "Elsinore", by Jack London
+******This file should be named elsnr10.txt or elsnr10.zip******
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+from the 1915 Mills and Boon edition.  It was proofed by Rab Hughes.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+From the first the voyage was going wrong.  Routed out of my hotel on
+a bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-
+end precisely on time.  At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me
+down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing
+irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited.  On the seat,
+outside, the driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps
+half a degree colder than mine.  And there was no tug.
+
+Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately
+foisted upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat
+and under the fur robe.  But he would not settle down.  Continually
+he whimpered and clawed and struggled to get out.  And, once out and
+bitten by the cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to
+get back.
+
+His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my
+jangled nerves.  In the first place I was uninterested in the brute.
+He meant nothing to me.  I did not know him.  Time and again, as I
+drearily waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver.
+Once, when two little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters--
+went by, my hand reached out to the door to open it so that I might
+call to them and present them with the puling little wretch.
+
+A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the
+hotel the night before, by express from New York.  It was Galbraith's
+way.  Yet he might so easily have been decently like other folk and
+sent fruit . . . or flowers, even.  But no; his affectionate
+inspiration had to take the form of a yelping, yapping two months'
+old puppy.  And with the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun.
+The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the act I had not even
+had time to meditate.  And then Wada, on his own initiative and out
+of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into
+his room and been caught by a house detective.  Promptly Wada had
+forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and
+the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the hotel clerk
+had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was only
+what he had expected of me.
+
+Damn the dog, anyway!  And damn Galbraith too!  And as I froze on in
+the cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad
+freak that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
+
+By ten o'clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-
+case, which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the
+wharfinger.  It belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions
+to the chauffeur how to find some other pier from which, at some
+indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the Elsinore by some
+other tug.  This served to increase my irritation.  Why should I not
+have been informed as well as the pilot?
+
+An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the
+new pier, the pilot arrived.  Anything more unlike a pilot I could
+not have imagined.  Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of
+the sea, but a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of
+successful business man one meets in all the clubs.  He introduced
+himself immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with
+Possum and the baggage.  That some change had been made in the
+arrangements by Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the
+tug would come along any time.
+
+And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to
+wait and freeze for four mortal hours.  During this time I fully made
+up my mind that I was not going to like this Captain West.  Although
+I had never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to
+say the least, cavalier.  When the Elsinore lay in Erie Basin, just
+arrived from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over
+from New York to inspect what was to be my home for many months.  I
+had been delighted with the ship and the cabin accommodation.  Even
+the stateroom selected for me was satisfactory and far more spacious
+than I had expected.  But when I peeped into the captain's room I was
+amazed at its comfort.  When I say that it opened directly into a
+bath-room, and that, among other things, it was furnished with a big
+brass bed such as one would never suspect to find at sea, I have said
+enough.
+
+Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed
+should be mine.  When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain
+they seemed non-committal and uncomfortable.  "I don't know in the
+least what it is worth," I said.  "And I don't care.  Whether it
+costs one hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have
+those quarters."
+
+Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and
+scarcely thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement.
+"Then he is the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn't," I
+asserted confidently.  "Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners
+regularly sell their quarters."
+
+"But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner," Mr.
+Harrison observed gently.
+
+"Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month," I retorted.  "Why,
+heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary."
+
+"We'll try," said Mr. Gray, "but we warn you not to place too much
+dependence on our efforts.  Captain West is in Searsport at the
+present time, and we will write him to-day.
+
+To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform
+me that Captain West had declined my offer.  "Did you offer him up to
+a thousand?" I demanded.  "What did he say?"
+
+"He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked," Mr. Gray
+replied.
+
+A day later I received a letter from Captain West.  The writing and
+the wording were old-fashioned and formal.  He regretted not having
+yet met me, and assured me that he would see personally that my
+quarters were made comfortable.  For that matter he had already
+dispatched orders to Mr. Pike, the first mate of the Elsinore, to
+knock out the partition between my state-room and the spare state-
+room adjoining.  Further--and here is where my dislike for Captain
+West began--he informed me that if, when once well at sea, I should
+find myself dissatisfied, he would gladly, in that case, exchange
+quarters with me.
+
+Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could
+ever persuade me to occupy Captain West's brass bed.  And it was this
+Captain Nathaniel West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me
+freezing on pier-ends through four miserable hours.  The less I saw
+of him on the voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a
+little tickle of pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I
+had dispatched on board from New York.  Thank the Lord, I did not
+depend on sea captains for entertainment.
+
+I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and
+while the tug's sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led
+by the pilot to an introduction with Captain West.  At the first
+glimpse I knew that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a
+pilot.  I had seen the best of the breed, the captains of the liners,
+and he no more resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced,
+gruff-voiced skippers I had read about in books.  By his side stood a
+woman, of whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous
+blob of colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was
+well-nigh buried.
+
+"My God!--his wife!" I darted in a whisper at the pilot.  "Going
+along with him? . . . "
+
+I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage,
+that the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of
+the Elsinore taking his wife on the voyage.  And Mr. Harrison had
+smiled and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a
+wife.
+
+"It's his daughter," the pilot replied under his breath.  "Come to
+see him off, I fancy.  His wife died over a year ago.  They say that
+is what sent him back to sea.  He'd retired, you know."
+
+Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
+touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips
+moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his
+personality.  Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could
+only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king
+or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a
+proposition of Euclid.  And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle
+of--oh--such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny
+wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was
+suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed
+similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before,
+were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound into speech.
+
+So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West
+that I was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what
+words of untold beneficence and wisdom.  Yet he uttered most
+commonplace regrets at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh
+surprise to me.  It was low and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as
+a bell and touched with a faint reminiscent twang of old New England.
+
+"And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay," he
+concluded my introduction to his daughter.  "Margaret, this is Mr.
+Pathurst."
+
+Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and
+I found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and
+gravely upon me.  It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating,
+searching gaze.  It was not that it was challenging, but that it was
+so insolently business-like.  It was much in the very way one would
+look at a new coachman he was about to engage.  I did not know then
+that she was to go on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the
+man who was to be a fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore
+only natural.  Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her
+lips and eyes smiled as she spoke.
+
+As we moved on to enter the tug's cabin I heard Possum's shivering
+whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take
+the creature in out of the cold.  I found him hovering about my
+luggage, wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my
+little automatic rifle.  I was startled by the mountain of luggage
+around which mine was no more than a fringe.  Ship's stores, was my
+first thought, until I noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases,
+and parcels and bundles of all sorts.  The initials on what looked
+suspiciously like a woman's hat trunk caught my eye--"M.W."  Yet
+Captain West's first name was Nathaniel.  On closer investigation I
+did find several "N.W's." but everywhere I could see "M.W's."  Then I
+remembered that he had called her Margaret.
+
+I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the
+cold deck biting my lips with vexation.  I had so expressly
+stipulated with the agents that no captain's wife was to come along.
+The last thing under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship
+was a woman.  But I had never thought about a captain's daughter.
+For two cents I was ready to throw the voyage over and return on the
+tug to Baltimore.
+
+By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I
+noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid
+being struck by the spring and vitality of her walk.  Her face,
+despite its firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was
+belied by the robustness of her body.  At least, one would argue that
+her body must be robust from her fashion of movement of it, though
+little could one divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of
+the furs.
+
+I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the
+mountain of luggage.  A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and
+I was staring at it when she spoke at my shoulder.
+
+"That's what really caused the delay," she said.
+
+"What is it?" I asked incuriously.
+
+"Why, the Elsinore's piano, all renovated.  When I made up my mind to
+come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike--he's the mate, you know.  He did his
+best.  It was the fault of the piano house.  And while we waited to-
+day I gave them a piece of my mind they'll not forget in a hurry."
+
+She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into
+the luggage as if in search of some particular piece.  Having
+satisfied herself, she was starting back, when she paused and said:
+
+"Won't you come into the cabin where it's warm?  We won't be there
+for half an hour."
+
+"When did you decide to make this voyage?" I demanded abruptly.
+
+So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment
+caught all my disgruntlement and disgust.
+
+"Two days ago," she answered.  "Why?"
+
+Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could
+speak she went on:
+
+"Now you're not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst.  I
+probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we're all
+going to be comfortable and happy.  You can't bother me, and I
+promise you I won't bother you.  I've sailed with passengers before,
+and I've learned to put up with more than they ever proved they were
+able to put up with.  So there.  Let us start right, and it won't be
+any trouble to keep on going right.  I know what is the matter with
+you.  You think you'll be called upon to entertain me.  Please know
+that I do not need entertainment.  I never saw the longest voyage
+that was too long, and I always arrive at the end with too many
+things not done for the passage ever to have been tedious, and . . .
+I don't play Chopsticks."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+The Elsinore, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when
+we came alongside.  I knew too little about ships to be capable of
+admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration.  I
+was still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole
+thing and return on the tug.  From all of which it must not be taken
+that I am a vacillating type of man.  On the contrary.
+
+The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I
+been keen for the voyage.  Practically the reason I was taking it was
+because there was nothing else I was keen on.  For some time now life
+had lost its savour.  I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored.  But
+the zest had gone out of things.  I had lost taste for my fellow-men
+and all their foolish, little, serious endeavours.  For a far longer
+period I had been dissatisfied with women.  I had endured them, but I
+had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their
+almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with
+them.  And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the
+futility of art--a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that
+deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners.
+
+In short, I was embarking on the Elsinore because it was easier to
+than not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy.
+That was the curse of the condition into which I had fallen.  That
+was why, as I stepped upon the deck of the Elsinore, I was half of a
+mind to tell them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain
+West and his daughter good-day.
+
+I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile
+Miss West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the
+cabin, and the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
+
+Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in
+Erie Basin.  He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be
+painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to
+call orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who
+shambled up from somewhere in the waist of the ship.  Mr. Pike had
+been drinking.  That was patent.  His face was puffed and
+discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.
+
+I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard
+and chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the
+few words that would put a stop to it.  As for the half-dozen men who
+were now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike
+any concept I had ever entertained of sailors.  Certainly, on the
+liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.
+
+One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair
+of remarkable Italian eyes.  But he was a dwarf.  So short was he
+that he was all sea-boots and sou'wester.  And yet he was not
+entirely Italian.  So certain was I that I asked the mate, who
+answered morosely:
+
+"Him?  Shorty?  He's a dago half-breed.  The other half's Jap or
+Malay."
+
+One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I
+thought he had been recently injured.  His face was stolid and ox-
+like, and as he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he
+paused every several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and
+execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement.  Months were to pass, in
+which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that there
+was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a
+habit.  His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it
+was unthinkably and abysmally stupider.  And his name, as I was to
+learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers.  And he was bosun of the fine
+American sailing-ship Elsinore--rated one of the finest sailing-ships
+afloat!
+
+Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw
+only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the
+slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like.  He had come
+off a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage
+to sea.  His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements,
+and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace.  In
+fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming
+creature fore and aft.
+
+The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any
+moment, the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy.
+Those already on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped
+themselves in New York without the mediation of boarding-house
+masters.  And what the crew itself would be like God alone could
+tell--so said the mate.  Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian
+half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come
+out of steam and this was his first sailing voyage.
+
+"Ordinary seamen!" Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question.  "We
+don't carry Landsmen!--forget it!  Every clodhopper an' cow-walloper
+these days is an able seaman.  That's the way they rank and are paid.
+The merchant service is all shot to hell.  There ain't no more
+sailors.  They all died years ago, before you were born even."
+
+I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate's breath.  Yet he did not
+stagger nor show any signs of intoxication.  Not until afterward was
+I to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was
+where the liquor gave him away.
+
+"It'd a-ben a grace had I died years ago," he said, "rather than to
+a-lived to see sailors an' ships pass away from the sea."
+
+"But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest," I
+urged.
+
+"So she is . . . to-day.  But what is she?--a damned cargo-carrier.
+She ain't built for sailin', an' if she was there ain't no sailors
+left to sail her.  Lord!  Lord!  The old clippers!  When I think of
+'em!--The Gamecock, Shootin' Star, Flyin' Fish, Witch o' the Wave,
+Staghound, Harvey Birch, Canvas-back, Fleetwing, Sea Serpent,
+Northern Light!  An' when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
+that used to load at Hong Kong an' race the Eastern Passages.  A fine
+sight!  A fine sight!"
+
+I was interested.  Here was a man, a live man.  I was in no hurry to
+go into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I
+paced up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike.  Huge he was in
+all conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the
+profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.
+
+"You are a splendid figure of a man," I complimented.
+
+"I was, I was," he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey
+strong on the air.
+
+I stole a look at his gnarled hands.  Any finger would have made
+three of mine.  His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
+
+"How much do you weigh?" I asked.
+
+"Two hundred an' ten.  But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales
+close to two-forty."
+
+"And the Elsinore can't sail," I said, returning to the subject which
+had roused him.
+
+"I'll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month's
+wages, she won't make it around in a hundred an' fifty days," he
+answered.  "Yet I've come round in the old Flyin' Cloud in eighty-
+nine days--eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to 'Frisco.  Sixty
+men for'ard that WAS men, an' eight boys, an' drive! drive! drive!
+Three hundred an' seventy-four miles for a day's run under
+t'gallantsails, an' in the squalls eighteen knots o' line not enough
+to time her.  Eighty-nine days--never beat, an' tied once by the old
+Andrew Jackson nine years afterwards.  Them was the days!"
+
+"When did the Andrew Jackson tie her?" I asked, because of the
+growing suspicion that he was "having" me.
+
+"In 1860," was his prompt reply.
+
+"And you sailed in the Flying Cloud nine years before that, and this
+is 1913--why, that was sixty-two years ago," I charged.
+
+"And I was seven years old," he chuckled.  "My mother was stewardess
+on the Flyin' Cloud.  I was born at sea.  I was boy when I was
+twelve, on the Herald o' the Morn, when she made around in ninety-
+nine days--half the crew in irons most o' the time, five men lost
+from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken
+square off, knuckle-dusters an' belayin'-pins flyin', three men shot
+by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an' no one to
+know who done it, an' drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land
+to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an' east to west around
+Cape Stiff!"
+
+"But that would make you sixty-nine years old," I insisted.
+
+"Which I am," he retorted proudly, "an' a better man at that than the
+scrubby younglings of these days.  A generation of 'em would die
+under the things I've been through.  Did you ever hear of the Sunny
+South?--she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an' changed her
+name to Emanuela?"
+
+"And you've sailed the Middle Passage!" I cried, recollecting the old
+phrase.
+
+"I was on the Emanuela that day in Mozambique Channel when the Brisk
+caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks.  Only she wouldn't
+a-caught us except for her having steam."
+
+I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the
+past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old
+man-killing and man-driving days.  He was too real to be true, and
+yet, as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge
+feet, I was convinced that his years were as he asserted.  He spoke
+of a Captain Sonurs.
+
+"He was a great captain," he was saying.  "An' in the two years I
+sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn't jump the ship
+goin' in an' stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed
+again."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"The men, on account of the men swearin' blood an' vengeance and
+warrants against me because of my ways of teachin' them to be
+sailors.  Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid
+for me--and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.''
+
+He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed
+knuckles I understood the nature of his work.
+
+"But all that's stopped now," he lamented.  "A sailor's a gentleman
+these days.  You can't raise your voice or your hand to them."
+
+At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the
+second mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
+
+"The tug's in sight with the crew, sir," he announced.
+
+The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, "Come on down, Mr.
+Mellaire, and meet our passenger."
+
+I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire
+came down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction.  He
+was courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and
+unmistakably from south of Mason and Dixon.
+
+"A Southerner," I said.
+
+"Georgia, sir."  He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow
+and smile.
+
+His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth
+was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face.  It was a
+gash.  There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped,
+shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously.
+Involuntarily I glanced at his hands.  Like the mate's, they were
+thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed.  Back into his blue eyes
+I looked.  On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of
+gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided
+neither sincerity nor mercy.  Behind that gloss was something cold
+and terrible, that lurked and waited and watched--something catlike,
+something inimical and deadly.  Behind that gloss of soft light and
+of social sparkle was the live, fearful thing that had shaped that
+mouth into the gash it was.  What I sensed behind in those eyes
+chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.
+
+As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and
+exchanged amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in
+the forest or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting
+animals are spying upon him.  Frankly I was afraid of the thing
+ambushed behind there in the skull of Mr. Mellaire.  One so as a
+matter of course identifies form and feature with the spirit within.
+But I could not do this with the second mate.  His face and form and
+manner and suave ease were one thing, inside which he, an entirely
+different thing, lay hid.
+
+I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask
+for instructions.  I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside.  Mr.
+Pike looked at me quickly and said:
+
+"Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst."
+
+He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and
+started for'ard.  I stood and waited for Mr. Pike's communication,
+which he did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out
+of ear-shot.  Then he leaned closely to me and said:
+
+"Don't mention that little matter of my age to anybody.  Each year I
+sign on I sign my age one year younger.  I am fifty-four, now, on the
+articles."
+
+"And you don't look a day older," I answered lightly, though I meant
+it in all sincerity.
+
+"And I don't feel it.  I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the
+younglings.  And don't let my age get to anybody's ears, Mr.
+Pathurst.  Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the
+seventy mark.  And owners neither.  I've had my hopes for this ship,
+and I'd a-got her, I think, except for the old man decidin' to go to
+sea again.  As if he needed the money!  The old skinflint!"
+
+"Is he well off?" I inquired.
+
+"Well off!  If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken
+ranch in California and live like a fighting cock--yes, if I had a
+fiftieth of what he's got salted away.  Why, he owns more stock in
+all the Blackwood ships . . . and they've always been lucky and
+always earned money.  I'm getting old, and it's about time I got a
+command.  But no; the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to
+sea again just as the berth's ripe for me to fall into."
+
+Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst?  You won't mention about my age?"
+
+"No, certainly not, Mr. Pike," I said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Quite chilled through, I was immediately struck by the warm comfort
+of the cabin.  All the connecting doors were open, making what I
+might call a large suite of rooms or a whale house.  The main-deck
+entrance, on the port side, was into a wide, well-carpeted hallway.
+Into this hallway, from the port side, opened five rooms:  first, on
+entering, the mate's; next, the two state-rooms which had been
+knocked into one for me; then the steward's room; and, adjoining his,
+completing the row, a state-room which was used for the slop-chest.
+
+Across the hall was a region with which I was not yet acquainted,
+though I knew it contained the dining-room, the bath-rooms, the cabin
+proper, which was in truth a spacious living-room, the captain's
+quarters, and, undoubtedly, Miss West's quarters.  I could hear her
+humming some air as she bustled about with her unpacking.  The
+steward's pantry, separated by crosshalls and by the stairway leading
+into the chart-room above on the poop, was placed strategically in
+the centre of all its operations.  Thus, on the starboard side of it
+were the state-rooms of the captain and Miss West, for'ard of it were
+the dining-room and main cabin; while on the port side of it was the
+row of rooms I have described, two of which were mine.
+
+I ventured down the hall toward the stern, and found it opened into
+the stern of the Elsinore, forming a single large apartment at least
+thirty-five feet from side to side and fifteen to eighteen feet in
+depth, curved, of course, to the lines of the ship's stern.  This
+seemed a store-room.  I noted wash-tubs, bolts of canvas, many
+lockers, hams and bacon hanging, a step-ladder that led up through a
+small hatch to the poop, and, in the floor, another hatch.
+
+I spoke to the steward, an old Chinese, smooth-faced and brisk of
+movement, whose name I never learned, but whose age on the articles
+was fifty-six.
+
+"What is down there?" I asked, pointing to the hatch in the floor.
+
+"Him lazarette," he answered.
+
+"And who eats there?" I indicated a table with two stationary sea-
+chairs.
+
+"Him second table.  Second mate and carpenter him eat that table."
+
+When I had finished giving instructions to Wada for the arranging of
+my things I looked at my watch.  It was early yet, only several
+minutes after three so I went on deck again to witness the arrival of
+the crew.
+
+The actual coming on board from the tug I had missed, but for'ard of
+the amidship house I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone
+into the forecastle.  These were the worse for liquor, and a more
+wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any
+slum.  Their clothes were rags.  Their faces were bloated, bloody,
+and dirty.  I won't say they were villainous.  They were merely
+filthy and vile.  They were vile of appearance, of speech, and
+action.
+
+"Come!  Come!  Get your dunnage into the fo'c's'le!"
+
+Mr. Pike uttered these words sharply from the bridge above.  A light
+and graceful bridge of steel rods and planking ran the full length of
+the Elsinore, starting from the poop, crossing the amidship house and
+the forecastle, and connecting with the forecastle-head at the very
+bow of the ship.
+
+At the mate's command the men reeled about and glowered up at him,
+one or two starting clumsily to obey.  The others ceased their
+drunken yammerings and regarded the mate sullenly.  One of them, with
+a face mashed by some mad god in the making, and who was afterwards
+to be known by me as Larry, burst into a guffaw, and spat insolently
+on the deck.  Then, with utmost deliberation, he turned to his
+fellows and demanded loudly and huskily:
+
+"Who in hell's the old stiff, anyways?"
+
+I saw Mr. Pike's huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and
+I noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the
+bridge-railing.  Beyond that he controlled himself.
+
+"Go on, you," he said.  "I'll have nothing out of you.  Get into the
+fo'c's'le."
+
+And then, to my surprise, he turned and walked aft along the bridge
+to where the tug was casting off its lines.  So this was all his high
+and mighty talk of kill and drive, I thought.  Not until afterwards
+did I recollect, as I turned aft down the deck, that I saw Captain
+West leaning on the rail at the break of the poop and gazing for'ard.
+
+The tug's lines were being cast off, and I was interested in watching
+the manoeuvre until she had backed clear of the ship, at which
+moment, from for'ard, arose a queer babel of howling and yelping, as
+numbers of drunken voices cried out that a man was overboard.  The
+second mate sprang down the poop-ladder and darted past me along the
+deck.  The mate, still on the slender, white-painted bridge, that
+seemed no more than a spider thread, surprised me by the activity
+with which he dashed along the bridge to the 'midship house, leaped
+upon the canvas-covered long-boat, and swung outboard where he might
+see.  Before the men could clamber upon the rail the second mate was
+among them, and it was he who flung a coil of line overboard.
+
+What impressed me particularly was the mental and muscular
+superiority of these two officers.  Despite their age--the mate
+sixty-nine and the second mate at least fifty--their minds and their
+bodies had acted with the swiftness and accuracy of steel springs.
+They were potent.  They were iron.  They were perceivers, willers,
+and doers.  They were as of another species compared with the sailors
+under them.  While the latter, witnesses of the happening and
+directly on the spot, had been crying out in befuddled helplessness,
+and with slow wits and slower bodies been climbing upon the rail, the
+second mate had descended the steep ladder from the poop, covered two
+hundred feet of deck, sprung upon the rail, grasped the instant need
+of the situation, and cast the coil of line into the water.
+
+And of the same nature and quality had been the actions of Mr. Pike.
+He and Mr. Mellaire were masters over the wretched creatures of
+sailors by virtue of this remarkable difference of efficiency and
+will.  Truly, they were more widely differentiated from the men under
+them than were the men under them differentiated from Hottentots--ay,
+and from monkeys.
+
+I, too, by this time, was standing on the big hawser-bitts in a
+position to see a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming
+away from the ship.  He was a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some
+sort, and his face, in a clear glimpse I caught of it, was distorted
+by frenzy.  His black eyes were maniacal.  The line was so accurately
+flung by the second mate that it fell across the man's shoulders, and
+for several strokes his arms tangled in it ere he could swim clear.
+This accomplished, he proceeded to scream some wild harangue and
+once, as he uptossed his arms for emphasis, I saw in his hand the
+blade of a long knife.
+
+Bells were jangling on the tug as it started to the rescue.  I stole
+a look up at Captain West.  He had walked to the port side of the
+poop, where, hands in pockets, he was glancing, now for'ard at the
+struggling man, now aft at the tug.  He gave no orders, betrayed no
+excitement, and appeared, I may well say, the most casual of
+spectators.
+
+The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his
+clothes.  I saw one bare arm, and then the other, appear.  In his
+struggles he sometimes sank beneath the surface, but always he
+emerged, flourishing the knife and screaming his addled harangue.  He
+even tried to escape the tug by diving and swimming underneath.
+
+I strolled for'ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over
+the rail of the Elsinore.  He was stark naked, covered with blood,
+and raving.  He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places.
+From one wound in the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the
+pulse.  He was a loathsome, non-human thing.  I have seen a scared
+orang in a zoo, and for all the world this bestial-faced, mowing,
+gibbering thing reminded me of the orang.  The sailors surrounded
+him, laying hands on him, withstraining him, the while they guffawed
+and cheered.  Right and left the two mates shoved them away, and
+dragged the lunatic down the deck and into a room in the 'midship
+house.  I could not help marking the strength of Mr. Pike and Mr.
+Mellaire.  I had heard of the superhuman strength of madmen, but this
+particular madman was as a wisp of straw in their hands.  Once into
+the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the struggling fool easily with one hand
+while he dispatched the second mate for marlin with which to tie the
+fellow's arms.
+
+"Bughouse," Mr. Pike grinned at me.  "I've seen some bughouse crews
+in my time, but this one's the limit."
+
+"What are you going to do?" I asked.  "The man will bleed to death."
+
+"And good riddance," he answered promptly.  "We'll have our hands
+full of him until we can lose him somehow.  When he gets easy I'll
+sew him up, that's all, if I have to ease him with a clout of the
+jaw."
+
+I glanced at the mate's huge paw and appreciated its anaesthetic
+qualities.  Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands
+still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the
+sky to the north-east.  More than the mates and the maniac, more than
+the drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in
+pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world from any I
+had known.
+
+Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say
+that Miss West was serving tea in the cabin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+The contrast, as I entered the cabin, was startling.  All contrasts
+aboard the Elsinore promised to be startling.  Instead of the cold,
+hard deck my feet sank into soft carpet.  In place of the mean and
+narrow room, built of naked iron, where I had left the lunatic, I was
+in a spacious and beautiful apartment.  With the bawling of the men's
+voices still in my ears, and with the pictures of their drink-puffed
+and filthy faces still vivid under my eyelids, I found myself greeted
+by a delicate-faced, prettily-gowned woman who sat beside a lacquered
+oriental table on which rested an exquisite tea-service of Canton
+china.  All was repose and calm.  The steward, noiseless-footed,
+expressionless, was a shadow, scarcely noticed, that drifted into the
+room on some service and drifted out again.
+
+Not at once could I relax, and Miss West, serving my tea, laughed and
+said:
+
+"You look as if you had been seeing things.  The steward tells me a
+man has been overboard.  I fancy the cold water must have sobered
+him."
+
+I resented her unconcern.
+
+"The man is a lunatic," I said.  "This ship is no place for him.  He
+should be sent ashore to some hospital."
+
+"I am afraid, if we begin that, we'd have to send two-thirds of our
+complement ashore--one lump?
+
+"Yes, please," I answered.  "But the man has terribly wounded
+himself.  He is liable to bleed to death."
+
+She looked at me for a moment, her gray eyes serious and
+scrutinizing, as she passed me my cup; then laughter welled up in her
+eyes, and she shook her head reprovingly.
+
+"Now please don't begin the voyage by being shocked, Mr. Pathurst.
+Such things are very ordinary occurrences.  You'll get used to them.
+You must remember some queer creatures go down to the sea in ships.
+The man is safe.  Trust Mr. Pike to attend to his wounds.  I've never
+sailed with Mr. Pike, but I've heard enough about him.  Mr. Pike is
+quite a surgeon.  Last voyage, they say, he performed a successful
+amputation, and so elated was he that he turned his attention on the
+carpenter, who happened to be suffering from some sort of
+indigestion.  Mr. Pike was so convinced of the correctness of his
+diagnosis that he tried to bribe the carpenter into having his
+appendix removed."  She broke off to laugh heartily, then added:
+"They say he offered the poor man just pounds and pounds of tobacco
+to consent to the operation."
+
+"But is it safe . . . for the . . . the working of the ship," I
+urged, "to take such a lunatic along?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, as if not intending to reply, then said:
+
+"This incident is nothing.  There are always several lunatics or
+idiots in every ship's company.  And they always come aboard filled
+with whiskey and raving.  I remember, once, when we sailed from
+Seattle, a long time ago, one such madman.  He showed no signs of
+madness at all; just calmly seized two boarding-house runners and
+sprang overboard with them.  We sailed the same day, before the
+bodies were recovered."
+
+Again she shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What would you?  The sea is hard, Mr. Pathurst.  And for our sailors
+we get the worst type of men.  I sometimes wonder where they find
+them.  And we do our best with them, and somehow manage to make them
+help us carry on our work in the world.  But they are low . . . low."
+
+As I listened, and studied her face, contrasting her woman's
+sensitivity and her soft pretty dress with the brute faces and rags
+of the men I had noticed, I could not help being convinced
+intellectually of the rightness of her position.  Nevertheless, I was
+hurt sentimentally,--chiefly, I do believe, because of the very
+hardness and unconcern with which she enunciated her view.  It was
+because she was a woman, and so different from the sea-creatures,
+that I resented her having received such harsh education in the
+school of the sea.
+
+"I could not help remarking your father's--er, er sang froid during
+the occurrence."  I ventured.
+
+"He never took his hands from his pockets!" she cried.
+
+Her eyes sparkled as I nodded confirmation.
+
+"I knew it!  It's his way.  I've seen it so often.  I remember when I
+was twelve years old--mother was alone--we were running into San
+Francisco.  It was in the Dixie, a ship almost as big as this.  There
+was a strong fair wind blowing, and father did not take a tug.  We
+sailed right through the Golden Gate and up the San Francisco water-
+front.  There was a swift flood tide, too; and the men, both watches,
+were taking in sail as fast as they could.
+
+"Now the fault was the steamboat captain's.  He miscalculated our
+speed and tried to cross our bow.  Then came the collision, and the
+Dixie's bow cut through that steamboat, cabin and hull.  There were
+hundreds of passengers, men, women, and children.  Father never took
+his hands from his pockets.  He sent the mate for'ard to superintend
+rescuing the passengers, who were already climbing on to our bowsprit
+and forecastle-head, and in a voice no different from what he'd use
+to ask some one to pass the butter he told the second mate to set all
+sail.  And he told him which sails to begin with."
+
+"But why set more sails?" I interrupted.
+
+"Because he could see the situation.  Don't you see, the steamboat
+was cut wide open.  All that kept her from sinking instantly was the
+bow of the Dixie jammed into her side.  By setting more sail and
+keeping before the wind, he continued to keep the bow of the Dixie
+jammed.
+
+"I was terribly frightened.  People who had sprung or fallen
+overboard were drowning on each side of us, right in my sight, as we
+sailed along up the water-front.  But when I looked at father, there
+he was, just as I had always known him, hands in pockets, walking
+slowly up and down, now giving an order to the wheel--you see, he had
+to direct the Dixie's course through all the shipping--now watching
+the passengers swarming over our bow and along our deck, now looking
+ahead to see his way through the ships at anchor.  Sometimes he did
+glance at the poor, drowning ones, but he was not concerned with
+them.
+
+"Of course, there were numbers drowned, but by keeping his hands in
+his pockets and his head cool he saved hundreds of lives.  Not until
+the last person was off the steamboat--he sent men aboard to make
+sure--did he take off the press of sail.  And the steamboat sank at
+once."
+
+She ceased, and looked at me with shining eyes for approbation.
+
+"It was splendid," I acknowledged.  "I admire the quiet man of power,
+though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
+unearthly and beyond human.  I can't conceive of myself acting that
+way, and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor
+devil was in the water than all the rest of the onlookers put
+together."
+
+"Father suffers!" she defended loyally.  "Only he does not show it."
+
+I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug Britannia in sight.
+She was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea.
+Strolling for'ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the
+forecastle by Sundry Buyers, for ever tenderly pressing his abdomen
+with his hands.  Another man was helping Sundry Buyers at routing out
+the sailors.  I asked Mr. Pike who the man was.
+
+"Nancy--my bosun; ain't he a peach?" was the answer I got, and from
+the mate's manner of enunciation I was quite aware that "Nancy" had
+been used derisively.
+
+Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he
+had lived a very long time.  He was toothless and sad and weary of
+movement.  His eyes were slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face
+was sickly yellow.  Narrow-shouldered, sunken-chested, with cheeks
+cavernously hollow, he looked like a man in the last stages of
+consumption.  Little life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even
+less life.  And these were bosuns!--bosuns of the fine American
+sailing-ship Elsinore!  Never had any illusion of mine taken a more
+distressing cropper.
+
+It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless,
+were afraid of the men they were supposed to boss.  And the men!
+Dore could never have conjured a more delectable hell's broth.  For
+the first time I saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns
+for being afraid of them.  They did not walk.  They slouched and
+shambled, some even tottered, as from weakness or drink.
+
+But it was their faces.  I could not help remembering what Miss West
+had just told me--that ships always sailed with several lunatics or
+idiots in their crews.  But these looked as if they were all lunatic
+or feeble-minded.  And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human
+wreckage could have been obtained.  There was something wrong with
+all of them.  Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and
+almost without exception they were under-sized.  The several quite
+fairly large men I marked were vacant-faced.  One man, however, large
+and unmistakably Irish, was also unmistakably mad.  He was talking
+and muttering to himself as he came out.  A little, curved, lop-sided
+man, with his head on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest
+of faces and pale blue eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad
+Irishman, calling him O'Sullivan.  But O'Sullivan took no notice and
+muttered on.  On the heels of the little lop-sided man appeared an
+overgrown dolt of a fat youth, followed by another youth so tall and
+emaciated of body that it seemed a marvel his flesh could hold his
+frame together.
+
+Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
+have ever beheld.  He was a twisted oaf of a man.  Face and body were
+twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture.  His was the
+face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun.  His large black eyes
+were bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed
+questioningly from face to face and to everything about.  They were
+so pitifully alert, those eyes, as if for ever astrain to catch the
+clue to some perplexing and threatening enigma.  Not until afterwards
+did I learn the cause of this.  He was stone deaf, having had his
+ear-drums destroyed in the boiler explosion which had wrecked the
+rest of him.
+
+I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the
+men from a distance.  His keen, Asiatic face, quick with
+intelligence, was a relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of
+Shorty, who came out of the forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of
+laughter.  But there was something wrong with him, too.  He was a
+dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his high spirits and low
+mentality united to make him a clown.
+
+Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I
+watched him.  The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer,
+and it was plain that he was disgusted with the quality of cattle
+delivered.
+
+"Something the matter with the last mother's son of them," he
+growled.
+
+And still they came:  one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly
+adjudged a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced
+and wrinkled, with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small,
+well-fleshed man, who seemed to my eye the most normal and least
+unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared.  But Mr. Pike's eye was
+better trained than mine.
+
+"What's the matter with YOU?" he snarled at the man.
+
+"Nothing, sir," the fellow answered, stopping immediately.
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+Mr. Pike never spoke to a sailor save with a snarl.
+
+"Charles Davis, sir."
+
+"What are you limping about?"
+
+"I ain't limpin', sir," the man answered respectfully, and, at a nod
+of dismissal from the mate, marched off jauntily along the deck with
+a heodlum swing to the shoulders.
+
+"He's a sailor all right," the mate grumbled; "but I'll bet you a
+pound of tobacco or a month's wages there's something wrong with
+him."
+
+The forecastle now seemed empty, but the mate turned on the bosuns
+with his customary snarl.
+
+"What in hell are you doing?  Sleeping?  Think this is a rest cure?
+Get in there an' rustle 'em out!"
+
+Sundry Buyers pressed his abdomen gingerly and hesitated, while
+Nancy, his face one dogged, long-suffering bleakness, reluctantly
+entered the forecastle.  Then, from inside, we heard oaths, vile and
+filthy, urgings and expostulations on the part of Nancy, meekly and
+pleadingly uttered.
+
+I noted the grim and savage look that came on Mr. Pike's face, and
+was prepared for I knew not what awful monstrosities to emerge from
+the forecastle.  Instead, to my surprise, came three fellows who were
+strikingly superior to the ruck that had preceded them.  I looked to
+see the mate's face soften to some sort of approval.  On the
+contrary, his blue eyes contracted to narrow slits, the snarl of his
+voice was communicated to his lips, so that he seemed like a dog
+about to bite.
+
+But the three fellows.  They were small men, all; and young men,
+anywhere between twenty-five and thirty.  Though roughly dressed,
+they were well dressed, and under their clothes their bodily
+movements showed physical well-being.  Their faces were keen cut,
+intelligent.  And though I felt there was something queer about them,
+I could not divine what it was.
+
+Here were no ill-fed, whiskey-poisoned men, such as the rest of the
+sailors, who, having drunk up their last pay-days, had starved ashore
+until they had received and drunk up their advance money for the
+present voyage.  These three, on the other hand were supple and
+vigorous.  Their movements were spontaneously quick and accurate.
+Perhaps it was the way they looked at me, with incurious yet
+calculating eyes that nothing escaped.  They seemed so worldly wise,
+so indifferent, so sure of themselves.  I was confident they were not
+sailors.  Yet, as shore-dwellers, I could not place them.  They were
+a type I had never encountered.  Possibly I can give a better idea of
+them by describing what occurred.
+
+As they passed before us they favoured Mr. Pike with the same
+indifferent, keen glances they gave me.
+
+"What's your name--you?" Mr. Pike barked at the first of the trio,
+evidently a hybrid Irish-Jew.  Jewish his nose unmistakably was.
+Equally unmistakable was the Irish of his eyes, and jaw, and upper
+lip.
+
+The three had immediately stopped, and, though they did not look
+directly at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent
+conference.  Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows
+what Semitic, Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal.
+Oh, nothing so crass as a wink or a nod.  I almost doubted that I had
+intercepted it, and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his
+fellows.  More a shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a
+glint in them of sudden light--or whatever it was, it carried the
+message.
+
+"Murphy," the other answered the mate.
+
+"Sir!" Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Murphy shrugged his shoulders in token that he did not understand.
+It was the poise of the man, of the three of them, the cool poise
+that impressed me.
+
+"When you address any officer on this ship you'll say 'sir,'" Mr.
+Pike explained, his voice as harsh as his face was forbidding.  "Did
+you get THAT?"
+
+"Yes .  . sir,'' Murphy drawled with deliberate slowness.  "I
+gotcha."
+
+"Sir!" Mr. Pike roared.
+
+"Sir," Murphy answered, so softly and carelessly that it irritated
+the mate to further bullyragging.
+
+"Well, Murphy's too long," he announced.  "Nosey'll do you aboard
+this craft.  Got THAT?"
+
+"I gotcha . . . sir," came the reply, insolent in its very softness
+and unconcern.  "Nosey Murphy goes . . . sir."
+
+And then he laughed--the three of them laughed, if laughter it might
+be called that was laughter without sound or facial movement.  The
+eyes alone laughed, mirthlessly and cold-bloodedly.
+
+Certainly Mr. Pike was not enjoying himself with these baffling
+personalities.  He turned upon the leader, the one who had given the
+warning and who looked the admixture of all that was Mediterranean
+and Semitic.
+
+"What's YOUR name?"
+
+"Bert Rhine . . . sir," was the reply, in tones as soft and careless
+and silkily irritating as the other's.
+
+"And YOU?"--this to the remaining one, the youngest of the trio, a
+dark-eyed, olive-skinned fellow with a face most striking in its
+cameo-like beauty.  American-born, I placed him, of immigrants from
+Southern Italy--from Naples, or even Sicily.
+
+"Twist . . . sir," he answered, precisely in the same manner as the
+others.
+
+"Too long," the mate sneered.  "The Kid'll do you.  Got THAT?"
+
+"I gotcha . . . sir.  Kid Twist'll do me . . . sir."
+
+"Kid'll do!"
+
+"Kid . . . sir."
+
+And the three laughed their silent, mirthless laugh.  By this time
+Mr. Pike was beside himself with a rage that could find no excuse for
+action.
+
+"Now I'm going to tell you something, the bunch of you, for the good
+of your health."  The mate's voice grated with the rage he was
+suppressing.  "I know your kind.  You're dirt.  D'ye get THAT?
+You're dirt.  And on this ship you'll be treated as dirt.  You'll do
+your work like men, or I'll know the reason why.  The first time one
+of you bats an eye, or even looks like batting an eye, he gets his.
+D'ye get that?  Now get out.  Get along for'ard to the windlass."
+
+Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved
+aft.
+
+"What do you make of them?" I queried.
+
+"The limit," he grunted.  "I know their kidney.  They've done time,
+the three of them.  They're just plain sweepings of hell--"
+
+Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on
+Number Two hatch.  Sprawled out on the hatch were five or six men,
+among them Larry, the tatterdemalion who had called him "old stiff"
+earlier in the afternoon.  That Larry had not obeyed orders was
+patent, for he was sitting with his back propped against his sea-bag,
+which ought to have been in the forecastle.  Also, he and the group
+with him ought to have been for'ard manning the windlass.
+
+The mate stepped upon the hatch and towered over the man.
+
+"Get up," he ordered.
+
+Larry made an effort, groaned, and failed to get up.
+
+"I can't," he said.
+
+"Sir!"
+
+"I can't, sir.  I was drunk last night an' slept in Jefferson Market.
+An' this mornin' I was froze tight, sir.  They had to pry me loose."
+
+"Stiff with the cold you were, eh?" the mate grinned.
+
+"It's well ye might say it, sir," Larry answered.
+
+"And you feel like an old stiff, eh?"
+
+Larry blinked with the troubled, querulous eyes of a monkey.  He was
+beginning to apprehend he knew not what, and he knew that bending
+over him was a man-master.
+
+"Well, I'll just be showin' you what an old stiff feels like,
+anyways."  Mr. Pike mimicked the other's brogue.
+
+And now I shall tell what I saw happen.  Please remember what I have
+said of the huge paws of Mr. Pike, the fingers much longer than mine
+and twice as thick, the wrists massive-boned, the arm-bones and the
+shoulder-bones of the same massive order.  With one flip of his right
+hand, with what I might call an open-handed, lifting, upward slap,
+save that it was the ends of the fingers only that touched Larry's
+face, he lifted Larry into the air, sprawling him backward on his
+back across his sea-bag.
+
+The man alongside of Larry emitted a menacing growl and started to
+spring belligerently to his feet.  But he never reached his feet.
+Mr. Pike, with the back of same right hand, open, smote the man on
+the side of the face.  The loud smack of the impact was startling.
+The mate's strength was amazing.  The blow looked so easy, so
+effortless; it had seemed like the lazy stroke of a good-natured
+bear, but in it was such a weight of bone and muscle that the man
+went down sidewise and rolled off the hatch on to the deck.
+
+At this moment, lurching aimlessly along, appeared O'Sullivan.  A
+sudden access of muttering, on his part, reached Mr. Pike's ear, and
+Mr. Pike, instantly keen as a wild animal, his paw in the act of
+striking O'Sullivan, whipped out like a revolver shot, "What's that?"
+Then he noted the sense-struck face of O'Sullivan and withheld the
+blow.  "Bug-house," Mr. Pike commented.
+
+Involuntarily I had glanced to see if Captain West was on the poop,
+and found that we were hidden from the poop by the 'midship house.
+
+Mr. Pike, taking no notice of the man who lay groaning on the deck,
+stood over Larry, who was likewise groaning.  The rest of the
+sprawling men were on their feet, subdued and respectful.  I, too,
+was respectful of this terrific, aged figure of a man.  The
+exhibition had quite convinced me of the verity of his earlier
+driving and killing days.
+
+"Who's the old stiff now?" he demanded.
+
+"'Tis me, sir," Larry moaned contritely.
+
+"Get up!"
+
+Larry got up without any difficulty at all.
+
+"Now get for'ard to the windlass!  The rest of you!"
+
+And they went, sullenly, shamblingly, like the cowed brutes they
+were.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+I climbed the ladder on the side of the for'ard house (which house
+contained, as I discovered, the forecastle, the galley, and the
+donkey-engine room), and went part way along the bridge to a position
+by the foremast, where I could observe the crew heaving up anchor.
+The Britannia was alongside, and we were getting under way.
+
+A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or
+variously engaged on the forecastle-head.  Of the crew proper were
+two watches of fifteen men each.  In addition were sailmakers, boys,
+bosuns, and the carpenter.  Nearly forty men were they, but such men!
+They were sad and lifeless.  There was no vim, no go, no activity.
+Every step and movement was an effort, as if they were dead men
+raised out of coffins or sick men dragged from hospital beds.  Sick
+they were--whiskey-poisoned.  Starved they were, and weak from poor
+nutrition.  And worst of all, they were imbecile and lunatic.
+
+I looked aloft at the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and
+carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel
+masts and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and
+stays turned into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the
+sky.  That such a wretched muck of men should be able to work this
+magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and peril of the sea
+was beyond all seeming.  I remembered the two mates, the super-
+efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike--could
+they make this human wreckage do it?  They, at least, evinced no
+doubts of their ability.  The sea?  If this feat of mastery were
+possible, then clear it was that I knew nothing of the sea.
+
+I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men
+who trod the dreary round of the windlass.  Mr. Pike was right.
+These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the
+ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who
+had the points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were
+killed, but who did their work as men.  These men, these shambling
+carcasses at the windlass--I looked, and looked, and vainly I strove
+to conjure the vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm,
+"clearing the raffle," as Kipling puts it, "with their clasp knives
+in their teeth."  Why didn't they sing a chanty as they hove the
+anchor up?  In the old days, as I had read, the anchor always came up
+to the rollicking sailor songs of sea-chested men.
+
+I tired of watching the spiritless performance, and went aft on an
+exploring trip along the slender bridge.  It was a beautiful
+structure, strong yet light, traversing the length of the ship in
+three aerial leaps.  It spanned from the forecastle-head to the
+forecastle-house, next to the 'midship house, and then to the poop.
+The poop, which was really the roof or deck over all the cabin space
+below, and which occupied the whole after-part of the ship, was very
+large.  It was broken only by the half-round and half-covered wheel-
+house at the very stern and by the chart-house.  On either side of
+the latter two doors opened into a tiny hallway.  This, in turn, gave
+access to the chart-room and to a stairway that led down into the
+cabin quarters beneath.
+
+I peeped into the chart-room and was greeted with a smile by Captain
+West.  He was lolling back comfortably in a swing chair, his feet
+cocked on the desk opposite.  On a broad, upholstered couch sat the
+pilot.  Both were smoking cigars; and, lingering for a moment to
+listen to the conversation, I grasped that the pilot was an ex-sea-
+captain.
+
+As I descended the stairs, from Miss West's room came a sound of
+humming and bustling, as she settled her belongings.  The energy she
+displayed, to judge by the cheerful noises of it, was almost
+perturbing.
+
+Passing by the pantry, I put my head inside the door to greet the
+steward and courteously let him know that I was aware of his
+existence.  Here, in his little realm, it was plain that efficiency
+reigned.  Everything was spotless and in order, and I could have
+wished and wished vainly for a more noiseless servant than he ashore.
+His face, as he regarded me, had as little or as much expression as
+the Sphinx.  But his slant, black eyes were bright, with
+intelligence.
+
+"What do you think of the crew?" I asked, in order to put words to my
+invasion of his castle.
+
+"Buggy-house," he answered promptly, with a disgusted shake of the
+head.  "Too much buggy-house.  All crazy.  You see.  No good.
+Rotten.  Down to hell."
+
+That was all, but it verified my own judgment.  While it might be
+true, as Miss West had said, that every ship's crew contained several
+lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew
+contained far more than several.  In fact, and as it was to turn out,
+our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew
+in so far as its helplessness and worthlessness were beyond the
+average.
+
+I found my own room (in reality it was two rooms) delightful.  Wada
+had unpacked and stored away my entire outfit of clothing, and had
+filled numerous shelves with the library I had brought along.
+Everything was in order and place, from my shaving outfit in the
+drawer beside the wash-basin, and my sea-boots and oilskins hung
+ready to hand, to my writing materials on the desk, before which a
+swing arm-chair, leather-upholstered and screwed solidly to the
+floor, invited me.  My pyjamas and dressing-gown were out.  My
+slippers, in their accustomed place by the bed, also invited me.
+
+Here, aft, all was fitness, intelligence.  On deck it was what I have
+described--a nightmare spawn of creatures, assumably human, but
+malformed, mentally and physically, into caricatures of men.  Yes, it
+was an unusual crew; and that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire could whip it
+into the efficient shape necessary to work this vast and intricate
+and beautiful fabric of a ship was beyond all seeming of possibility.
+
+Depressed as I was by what I had just witnessed on deck, there came
+to me, as I leaned back in my chair and opened the second volume of
+George Moore's Hail and Farewell, a premonition that the voyage was
+to be disastrous.  But then, as I looked about the room, measured its
+generous space, realized that I was more comfortably situated than I
+had ever been on any passenger steamer, I dismissed foreboding
+thoughts and caught a pleasant vision of myself, through weeks and
+months, catching up with all the necessary reading which I had so
+long neglected.
+
+Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew.  No, he hadn't, but the
+steward had said that in all his years at sea this was the worst crew
+he had ever seen.
+
+"He say, all crazy, no sailors, rotten," Wada said.  "He say all big
+fools and bime by much trouble.  'You see,' he say all the time.
+'You see, You see.'  He pretty old man--fifty-five years, he say.
+Very smart man for Chinaman.  Just now, first time for long time, he
+go to sea.  Before, he have big business in San Francisco.  Then he
+get much trouble--police.  They say he opium smuggle.  Oh, big, big
+trouble.  But he catch good lawyer.  He no go to jail.  But long time
+lawyer work, and when trouble all finish lawyer got all his business,
+all his money, everything.  Then he go to sea, like before.  He make
+good money.  He get sixty-five dollars a month on this ship.  But he
+don't like.  Crew all crazy.  When this time finish he leave ship, go
+back start business in San Francisco."
+
+Later, when I had Wada open one of the ports for ventilation, I could
+hear the gurgle and swish of water alongside, and I knew the anchor
+was up and that we were in the grip of the Britannia, towing down the
+Chesapeake to sea.  The idea suggested itself that it was not too
+late.  I could very easily abandon the adventure and return to
+Baltimore on the Britannia when she cast off the Elsinore.  And then
+I heard a slight tinkling of china from the pantry as the steward
+proceeded to set the table, and, also, it was so warm and
+comfortable, and George Moore was so irritatingly fascinating.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+In every way dinner proved up beyond my expectations, and I
+registered a note that the cook, whoever or whatever he might be, was
+a capable man at his trade.  Miss West served, and, though she and
+the steward were strangers, they worked together splendidly.  I
+should have thought, from the smoothness of the service, that he was
+an old house servant who for years had known her every way.
+
+The pilot ate in the chart-house, so that at table were the four of
+us that would always be at table together.  Captain West and his
+daughter faced each other, while I, on the captain's right, faced Mr.
+Pike.  This put Miss West across the corner on my right.
+
+Mr. Pike, his dark sack coat (put on for the meal) bulging and
+wrinkling over the lumps of muscles that padded his stooped
+shoulders, had nothing at all to say.  But he had eaten too many
+years at captains' tables not to have proper table manners.  At first
+I thought he was abashed by Miss West's presence.  Later, I decided
+it was due to the presence of the captain.  For Captain West had a
+way with him that I was beginning to learn.  Far removed as Mr. Pike
+and Mr. Mellaire were from the sailors, individuals as they were of
+an entirely different and superior breed, yet equally as different
+and far removed from his officers was Captain West.  He was a serene
+and absolute aristocrat.  He neither talked "ship" nor anything else
+to Mr. Pike.
+
+On the other hand, Captain West's attitude toward me was that of a
+social equal.  But then, I was a passenger.  Miss West treated me the
+same way, but unbent more to Mr. Pike.  And Mr. Pike, answering her
+with "Yes, Miss," and "No, Miss," ate good-manneredly and with his
+shaggy-browed gray eyes studied me across the table.  I, too, studied
+him.  Despite his violent past, killer and driver that he was, I
+could not help liking the man.  He was honest, genuine.  Almost more
+than for that, I liked him for the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave
+on the occasions when I reached the points of several funny stories.
+No man could laugh like that and be all bad.  I was glad that it was
+he, and not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit opposite throughout the
+voyage.  And I was very glad that Mr. Mellaire was not to eat with us
+at all.
+
+I am afraid that Miss West and I did most of the talking.  She was
+breezy, vivacious, tonic, and I noted again that the delicate, almost
+fragile oval of her face was given the lie by her body.  She was a
+robust, healthy young woman.  That was undeniable.  Not fat--heaven
+forbid!--not even plump; yet her lines had that swelling roundness
+that accompanies long, live muscles.  She was full-bodied, vigorous;
+and yet not so full-bodied as she seemed.  I remember with what
+surprise, when we arose from table, I noted her slender waist.  At
+that moment I got the impression that she was willowy.  And willowy
+she was, with a normal waist and with, in addition, always that
+informing bodily vigour that made her appear rounder and robuster
+than she really was.
+
+It was the health of her that interested me.  When I studied her face
+more closely I saw that only the lines of the oval of it were
+delicate.  Delicate it was not, nor fragile.  The flesh was firm, and
+the texture of the skin was firm and fine as it moved over the firm
+muscles of face and neck.  The neck was a beautiful and adequate
+pillar of white.  Its flesh was firm, its skin fine, and it was
+muscular.  The hands, too, attracted me--not small, but well-shaped,
+fine, white and strong, and well cared for.  I could only conclude
+that she was an unusual captain's daughter, just as her father was an
+unusual captain and man.  And their noses were alike, just the hint-
+touch of the beak of power and race.
+
+While Miss West was telling of the unexpectedness of the voyage, of
+how suddenly she had decided to come--she accounted for it as a whim-
+-and while she told of all the complications she had encountered in
+her haste of preparation, I found myself casting up a tally of the
+efficient ones on board the Elsinore.  They were Captain West and his
+daughter, the two mates, myself, of course, Wada and the steward,
+and, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the cook.  The dinner vouched for
+him.  Thus I found our total of efficients to be eight.  But the
+cook, the steward, and Wada were servants, not sailors, while Miss
+West and myself were supernumeraries.  Remained to work, direct, do,
+but three efficients out of a total ship's company of forty-five.  I
+had no doubt that other efficients there were; it seemed impossible
+that my first impression of the crew should be correct.  There was
+the carpenter.  He might, at his trade, be as good as the cook.  Then
+the two sailmakers, whom I had not yet seen, might prove up.
+
+A little later during the meal I ventured to talk about what had
+interested me and aroused my admiration, namely, the masterfulness
+with which Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire had gripped hold of that woeful,
+worthless crew.  It was all new to me, I explained, but I appreciated
+the need of it.  As I led up to the occurrence on Number Two hatch,
+when Mr. Pike had lifted up Larry and toppled him back with a mere
+slap from the ends of his fingers, I saw in Mr. Pike's eyes a
+warning, almost threatening, expression.  Nevertheless, I completed
+my description of the episode.
+
+When I had quite finished there was a silence.  Miss West was busy
+serving coffee from a copper percolator.  Mr. Pike, profoundly
+occupied with cracking walnuts, could not quite hide the wicked,
+little, half-humorous, half-revengeful gleam in his eyes.  But
+Captain West looked straight at me, but from oh! such a distance--
+millions and millions of miles away.  His clear blue eyes were as
+serene as ever, his tones as low and soft.
+
+"It is the one rule I ask to be observed, Mr. Pathurst--we never
+discuss the sailors."
+
+It was a facer to me, and with quite a pronounced fellow-feeling for
+Larry I hurriedly added:
+
+"It was not merely the discipline that interested me.  It was the
+feat of strength."
+
+"Sailors are trouble enough without our hearing about them, Mr.
+Pathurst," Captain West went on, as evenly and imperturbably as if I
+had not spoken.  "I leave the handling of the sailors to my officers.
+That's their business, and they are quite aware that I tolerate no
+undeserved roughness or severity."
+
+Mr. Pike's harsh face carried the faintest shadow of an amused grin
+as he stolidly regarded the tablecloth.  I glanced to Miss West for
+sympathy.  She laughed frankly, and said:
+
+"You see, father never has any sailors.  And it's a good plan, too."
+
+"A very good plan," Mr. Pike muttered.
+
+Then Miss West kindly led the talk away from that subject, and soon
+had us laughing with a spirited recital of a recent encounter of hers
+with a Boston cab-driver.
+
+Dinner over, I stepped to my room in quest of cigarettes, and
+incidentally asked Wada about the cook.  Wada was always a great
+gatherer of information.
+
+"His name Louis," he said.  "He Chinaman, too.  No; only half
+Chinaman.  Other half Englishman.  You know one island Napoleon he
+stop long time and bime by die that island?"
+
+"St. Helena," I prompted.
+
+"Yes, that place Louis he born.  He talk very good English."
+
+At this moment, entering the hall from the deck, Mr. Mellaire, just
+relieved by the mate, passed me on his way to the big room in the
+stern where the second table was set.  His "Good evening, sir," was
+as stately and courteous as any southern gentleman of the old days
+could have uttered it.  And yet I could not like the man.  His
+outward seeming was so at variance with the personality that resided
+within.  Even as he spoke and smiled I felt that from inside his
+skull he was watching me, studying me.  And somehow, in a flash of
+intuition, I knew not why, I was reminded of the three strange young
+men, routed last from the forecastle, to whom Mr. Pike had read the
+law.  They, too, had given me a similar impression.
+
+Behind Mr. Mellaire slouched a self-conscious, embarrassed
+individual, with the face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant.
+His feet were even larger than Mr. Pike's, but the hands--I shot a
+quick glance to see--were not so large as Mr. Pike's.
+
+As they passed I looked inquiry to Wada.
+
+"He carpenter.  He sat second table.  His name Sam Lavroff.  He come
+from New York on ship.  Steward say he very young for carpenter,
+maybe twenty-two, three years old."
+
+As I approached the open port over my desk I again heard the swish
+and gurgle of water and again realized that we were under way.  So
+steady and noiseless was our progress, that, say seated at table, it
+never entered one's head that we were moving or were anywhere save on
+the solid land. I had been used to steamers all my life, and it was
+difficult immediately to adjust myself to the absence of the
+propeller-thrust vibration.
+
+"Well, what do you think?" I asked Wada, who, like myself, had never
+made a sailing-ship voyage.
+
+He smiled politely.
+
+"Very funny ship.  Very funny sailors. I don't know.  Mebbe all
+right.  We see."
+
+"You think trouble?" I asked pointedly.
+
+"I think sailors very funny," he evaded.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for'ard along the deck to
+where work was going on.  Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed
+in the starlight. Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I
+might judge, who was only the veriest tyro in such matters.  The
+indistinguishable shapes of men, in long lines, pulled on ropes.
+They pulled in sick and dogged silence, though Mr. Pike, ubiquitous,
+snarled out orders and rapped out oaths from every angle upon their
+miserable heads.
+
+Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever
+proceeded so sadly and blunderingly to sea.  Ere long Mr. Mellaire
+joined Mr. Pike in the struggle of directing the men.  It was not yet
+eight in the evening, and all hands were at work.  They did not seem
+to know the ropes.  Time and again, when the half-hearted suggestions
+of the bosuns had been of no avail, I saw one or the other of the
+mates leap to the rail and put the right rope in the hands of the
+men.
+
+These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones.  Up aloft,
+from sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who
+were at least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails.
+
+But on deck!  Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope
+that hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with
+painfully slow movements.  "Walk away with it!" Mr. Pike would yell.
+And perhaps for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the
+rope ere they came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill.  And yet,
+did either of the mates spring in and add his strength, they were
+able to move right along the deck without stopping.  Either of the
+mates, old men that they were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of
+the wretched creatures.
+
+"This is what sailin's come to," Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
+"This ain't the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling.
+But what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?"
+
+"I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled," I said.
+
+"Sure they do.  Want to hear 'em?"
+
+I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered
+that I'd like to very much.
+
+"Here, you bosun!" Mr. Pike snarled.  "Wake up!  Start a song!
+Topsail halyards!"
+
+In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
+pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite
+bleakness freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
+
+Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
+have issued so sepulchral a plaint.  It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
+unlively, and indescribably doleful.  Yet the words showed that it
+should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness,
+for the words poor Nancy sang were:
+
+
+"Away, way, way, yar,
+We'll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots."
+
+
+"Quit it!  Quit it!" Mr. Pike roared.  "This ain't a funeral!  Ain't
+there one of you that can sing?  Come on, now!  It's a topsail-yard--
+"
+
+He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out
+of the men's hands to put into them the right rope.
+
+"Come on, bosun!  Break her out!"
+
+Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy
+and even more lugubrious than Nancy's:
+
+
+"Then up aloft that yard must go,
+Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+
+The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
+men feebly mumbled it.  Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
+
+
+"Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue."
+
+
+Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin
+and lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
+
+
+"And whiskey killed the old man, too,
+Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+
+He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
+work and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for my Johnny."
+
+And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
+until he interrupted the song to cry "Belay!"
+
+And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
+maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling
+and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
+when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
+first.  Skulkers there were among them, too; and once, from for'ard
+of the 'midship house, I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and
+out of the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on their heels Mr.
+Pike, who chanted a recital of the distressing things that would
+befall them if he caught them at such tricks again.
+
+The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further,
+so I strolled aft and climbed the poop.  In the lee of the chart-
+house Captain West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down.
+Passing on aft, I saw steering at the wheel the weazened little old
+man I had noted earlier in the day.  In the light of the binnacle his
+small blue eyes looked more malevolent than ever.  So weazened and
+tiny was he, and so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they
+seemed of a height.  His face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled,
+and in all seeming he was fifty years older than Mr. Pike.  He was
+the most remarkable figure of a burnt-out, aged man one would expect
+to find able seaman on one of the proudest sailing-ships afloat.
+Later, through Wada, I was to learn that his name was Andy Fay and
+that he claimed no more years than sixty-three.
+
+I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared
+up at the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there.
+No, I decided I was not keen on the voyage.  The whole atmosphere of
+it was wrong.  There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-
+ends.  There was Miss West coming along.  There was the crew of
+broken men and lunatics.  I wondered if the wounded Greek in the
+'midship house still gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up;
+and I was quite sure I would not care to witness such a transaction
+in surgery.
+
+Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of
+the voyage.  So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in
+sailing-ships.  So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not
+exist.  And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she
+could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters.  She had
+always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always
+live and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious
+personality.
+
+Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood.  Such was my condition
+that the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to
+me--for I knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be.
+And for five months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a
+pound of tobacco or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent
+on the same ship with her.  As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap,
+just that sure was I that ere the voyage was over I should be
+pestered by her making love to me.  Please do not mistake me.  My
+certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own
+desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of
+women as instinctive huntresses of men.  In my experience women
+hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit
+of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by
+the tendrils of the grapevine.
+
+Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-
+weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a
+young man of thirty.  For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these
+things--weary and in doubt.  It was because of this state that I was
+undertaking the voyage.  I wanted to get away by myself, to get away
+from all these things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter
+over.
+
+It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness
+had been brought about by the success of my play--my first play, as
+every one knows.  But it had been such a success that it raised the
+doubt in my own mind, just as the success of my several volumes of
+verse had raised doubts.  Was the public right?  Were the critics
+right?  Surely the function of the artist was to voice life, yet what
+did I know of life?
+
+So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that
+afflicted me.  Really, I had been, and was, very sick.  Mad thoughts
+of isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me.  I had
+even canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of
+my years to the lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and
+strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I
+knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the
+lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that
+mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.
+
+Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head.  Very
+well.  Granted.  But the turned head remains a fact, an
+incontrovertible fact--my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness,
+and a fact.  This I knew:  I had reached an intellectual and artistic
+climacteric, a life-climacteric of some sort.  And I had diagnosed my
+own case and prescribed this voyage.  And here was the atrociously
+healthy and profoundly feminine Miss West along--the very last
+ingredient I would have considered introducing into my prescription.
+
+A woman!  Woman!  Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by
+their persecutions to know them.  I leave it to you:  thirty years of
+age, not entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in
+the world, and an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue
+me?  They would have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake
+of my artistic place alone, for the sake of my income alone.
+
+Yes; and love!  Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
+love?  That, too, was of old time with me.  I, too, had throbbed and
+sung and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead.
+But it was so long ago.  How young I was--turned twenty-four!  And
+after that I had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief
+may die; and I had laughed again and done my share of philandering
+with the pretty, ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of
+my fortune and artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired
+disgusted from the lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking
+adventures in the realm of mind.  And here I was, on board the
+Elsinore, unhorsed by my encounters with the problems of the
+ultimate, carried off the field with a broken pate.
+
+As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
+could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as
+she made her little nest.  And from her my thought drifted on to the
+everlasting mystery of woman.  Yes, I, with all the futuristic
+contempt for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.
+
+Oh, no illusions, thank you.  Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
+possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than
+Lucifer and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid,
+attraction for the thinker.  What is this flame of her, blazing
+through all her contradictions and ignobilities?--this ruthless
+passion for life, always for life, more life on the planet?  At times
+it seems to me brazen, and awful, and soulless.  At times I am made
+petulant by it.  And at other times I am swayed by the sublimity of
+it.  No; there is no escape from woman.  Always, as a savage returns
+to a dark glen where goblins are and gods may be, so do I return to
+the contemplation of woman.
+
+Mr. Pike's voice interrupted my musings.  From for'ard, on the main
+deck, I heard him snarl:
+
+"On the main-topsail-yard, there!--if you cut that gasket I'll split
+your damned skull!"
+
+Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he
+called to I concluded was the training-ship boy.
+
+"You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!" he cried.  "Don't make those
+gaskets up!  Fetch 'em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!"
+
+Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed.  As my
+hand went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate's
+voice rang out:
+
+"Come on, you gentlemen's sons in disguise!  Wake up!  Lively now!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+I did not sleep well.  To begin with, I read late.  Not till two in
+the morning did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp
+which Wada had purchased and installed for me.  I was asleep
+immediately--perfect sleep being perhaps my greatest gift; but almost
+immediately I was awake again.  And thereafter, with dozings and cat-
+naps and restless tossings, I struggled to win to sleep, then gave it
+up.  For of all things, in my state of jangled nerves, to be
+afflicted with hives!  And still again, to be afflicted with hives in
+cold winter weather!
+
+At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated
+skin in Vernon Lee's delightful screed against William James, and his
+"will to believe."  I was on the weather side of the ship, and from
+overhead, through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer
+on watch.  I knew that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and
+wondered whether they were Mr. Mellaire's or the pilot's.  Somebody
+above there was awake.  The work was going on, the vigilant seeing
+and overseeing, that, I could plainly conclude, would go on through
+every hour of all the hours on the voyage.
+
+At half-past four I heard the steward's alarm go off, instantly
+suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in
+through my open door.  What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada
+had been with me through too many years for me to doubt that he had
+given the steward precise instructions and turned over to him my
+coffee and my coffee-making apparatus.
+
+The steward was a jewel.  In ten minutes he served me with a perfect
+cup of coffee.  I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found
+me, breakfast in bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck.  We
+were still towing, but all sails were set to a light favouring breeze
+from the north.  In the chart-room Captain West and the pilot were
+smoking cigars.  At the wheel I noted what I decided at once was an
+efficient.  He was not a large man; if anything he was undersized.
+But his countenance was broad-browed and intelligently formed.  Tom,
+I later learned, was his name--Tom Spink, an Englishman.  He was
+blue-eyed, fair-skinned, well-grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty
+years of age.  His reply of "Good morning, sir" was cheery, and he
+smiled as he uttered the simple phrase.  He did not look sailor-like,
+as did Henry, the training-ship boy; and yet I felt at once that he
+was a sailor, and an able one.
+
+It was Mr. Pike's watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
+admitted that the man was the "best of the boiling."
+
+Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and
+her vital, springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing
+her contacts.  On asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly,
+she demanded an explanation.  I told her of my affliction of hives
+and showed her the lumps on my wrists.
+
+"Your blood needs thinning and cooling," she adjudged promptly.
+"Wait a minute.  I'll see what can be done for you."
+
+And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand
+a part glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream
+of tartar.
+
+"Drink it," she ordered, as a matter of course.
+
+I drank it.  And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-
+chair with a second dose of the stuff.  Also she reproached me
+soundly for permitting Wada to feed meat to Possum.  It was from her
+that Wada and I learned how mortal a sin it was to give meat to a
+young puppy.  Furthermore, she laid down the law and the diet for
+Possum, not alone to me and Wada, but to the steward, the carpenter,
+and Mr. Mellaire.  Of the latter two, because they ate by themselves
+in the big after-room and because Possum played there, she was
+especially suspicious; and she was outspoken in voicing her
+suspicions to their faces.  The carpenter mumbled embarrassed
+asseverations in broken English of past, present, and future
+innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before her on his
+huge feet.  Mr. Mellaire's protestations were of the same nature,
+save that they were made with the grace and suavity of a
+Chesterfield.
+
+In short, Possum's diet raised quite a tempest in the Elsinore
+teapot, and by the time it was over Miss West had established this
+particular contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the
+mutual owners of the puppy.  I noticed, later in the day, that it was
+to Miss West that Wada went for instructions as to the quantity of
+warm water he must use to dilute Possum's condensed milk.
+
+Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook.  In the afternoon I
+made a trip for'ard to the galley to make his acquaintance.  To all
+intents he was a Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by
+speech alone, he was an Englishman.  In fact, so cultured was his
+speech that I can fairly say it was vested with an Oxford accent.
+He, too, was old, fully sixty--he acknowledged fifty-nine.  Three
+things about him were markedly conspicuous:  his smile, that embraced
+all of his clean-shaven Asiatic face and Asiatic eyes; his even-
+rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which I deemed false until Wada
+ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands and feet.  It was his
+hands, ridiculously small and beautifully modelled, that led my
+scrutiny to his feet.  They, too, were ridiculously small and very
+neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.
+
+We had put the pilot off at midday, but the Britannia towed us well
+into the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide
+about us and the land a faint blur on the western horizon.  Here, at
+the moment of leaving the tug, we made our "departure"--that is to
+say, technically began the voyage, despite the fact that we had
+already travelled a full twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.
+
+It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the poop-
+rail gazing for'ard, when Miss West joined me.  She had been busy
+below all day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of
+air.  She surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five
+minutes, then remarked:
+
+"The barometer's very high--30 degrees 60.  This light north wind
+won't last.  It will either go into a calm or work around into a
+north-east gale."
+
+"Which would you prefer?" I asked.
+
+"The gale, by all means.  It will help us off the land, and it will
+put me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly.  Oh, yes,"
+she added, "I'm a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the
+beginning of every voyage.  You probably won't see me for a couple of
+days now.  That's why I've been so busy getting settled first."
+
+"Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea,"
+I said.
+
+"And I've seen father sea-sick on occasion," she answered.  "Yes, and
+some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known."
+
+Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting
+pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.
+
+Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck
+below us.  To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing
+than ever.
+
+"A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike," Miss West remarked.
+
+"The worst ever," he growled, "and I've seen some pretty bad ones.
+We're teachin' them the ropes just now--most of 'em."
+
+"They look starved," I commented.
+
+"They are, they almost always are," Miss West answered, and her eyes
+roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer's fashion I had
+marked in Mr. Pike.  "But they'll fatten up with regular hours, no
+whiskey, and solid food--won't they, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"Oh, sure.  They always do.  And you'll see them liven up when we get
+'em in hand . . . maybe.  They're a measly lot, though."
+
+I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas.  Our four masts seemed
+to have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath
+us, under Mr. Mellaire's direction, were setting triangular sails,
+like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they
+overlapped one another.  The slowness and clumsiness with which the
+men handled these small sails led me to ask:
+
+"But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
+were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an
+earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head
+from both sides of a street.
+
+"Do?" Miss West answered for him.  "We'd get the sail off.  Oh, it
+can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew.  If it couldn't,
+I should have been drowned long ago."
+
+"Sure," Mr. Pike upheld her.  "So would I."
+
+"The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors,
+in a pinch," Miss West went on.
+
+Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big
+paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite
+unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists.  Also, I noted
+fresh abrasions on the knuckles.  Miss West laughed heartily, as from
+some recollection.
+
+"I remember one time when we sailed from San  Francisco with a most
+hopeless crew.  It was in the Lallah Rookh--YOU remember her, Mr.
+Pike?"
+
+"Your father's fifth command," he nodded.  "Lost on the West Coast
+afterwards--went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave.
+Parted her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell
+on her."
+
+"That's the ship.  Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
+bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else.  Where
+the boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining.  A number
+of them were shanghaied, that was certain.  You should have seen them
+when they were first sent aloft."  Again she laughed.  "It was better
+than circus clowns.  And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside
+the Heads, when it began to blow up and we began to shorten down.
+And then our mates performed miracles.  You remember Mr. Harding--
+Silas Harding?"
+
+"Don't I though!" Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically.  "He was some
+man, and he must have been an old man even then."
+
+"He was, and a terrible man," she concurred, and added, almost
+reverently:  "And a wonderful man."  She turned her face to me.  "He
+was our mate.  The men were sea-sick and miserable and green.  But
+Mr. Harding got the sail off the Lallah Rookh just the same.  What I
+wanted to tell you was this:
+
+"I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
+those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail.
+How far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"Let me see . . . the Lallah Rookh."  Mr. Pike paused to consider.
+"Oh, say around a hundred feet."
+
+"I saw it myself.  One of the green hands, a tramp--and he must
+already have got a taste of Mr. Harding--fell off the lower-topsail-
+yard.  I was only a little girl, but it looked like certain death,
+for he was falling from the weather side of the yard straight down on
+deck.  But he fell into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall,
+turned a somersault, and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt.  And
+he landed right alongside of Mr. Harding, facing him.  I don't know
+which was the more astonished, but I think Mr. Harding was, for he
+stood there petrified.  He had expected the man to be killed.  Not so
+the man.  He took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump for
+the rigging and climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.
+
+Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard
+me say:
+
+"Astonishing!  Think of the jar to the man's nerves, falling to
+apparent death that way."
+
+"He'd been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess," was Mr. Pike's
+remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.
+
+Which was all very well in a way.  Ships were ships, and judging by
+what I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary.
+But that a young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of
+such things and be so saturated in this side of ship life was not
+nice.  It was not nice for me, though it interested me, I confess,--
+and strengthened my grip on reality.  Yet it meant a hardening of
+one's fibres, and I did not like to think of Miss West being so
+hardened.
+
+I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
+firmness of her skin.  Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
+were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes.  Gray her
+eyes were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression,
+intelligent and alive.  Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most
+noteworthy expression of it was a great calm.  She seemed always in
+repose, at peace with herself and with the external world.  The most
+beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows
+and hair.  The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight,
+very straight, and just the slightest trifle too long.  In this it
+was reminiscent of her father's nose.  But the perfect modelling of
+the bridge and nostrils conveyed an indescribable advertisement of
+race and blood.
+
+Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous mouth--
+generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but generous
+rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter.  All the health and
+buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes.  She rarely
+exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed chiefly to
+employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong white teeth,
+even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm, sensible,
+normal size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal as she.
+
+I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many
+of the factors that go to compose feminine beauty.  She had all the
+beauty of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was
+emphasized by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair.  And, in
+the same way, the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of
+skin set off the warm gray of her eyes.  The forehead was, well,
+medium-broad and medium high, and quite smooth.  No lines nor hints
+of lines were there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of
+depression and white nights of insomnia.  Oh, she bore all the marks
+of the healthy, human female, who never worried nor was vexed in the
+spirit of her, and in whose body every process and function was
+frictionless and automatic.
+
+"Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet," I said to the
+mate.  "Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?"
+
+"She ought to be," was Mr. Pike's reply as he lifted his glance
+across the smooth swell of sea to the sky.  "This ain't the first
+time she's been on the North Atlantic in winter."  He debated a
+moment, as he studied the sea and sky.  "I should say, considering
+the high barometer, we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east
+or a calm, with the chances in favour of the calm."
+
+She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the
+rail as the Elsinore lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into
+the trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in
+hollow thunder.
+
+"The calm has it," Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness.
+"And if this keeps up I'll be in my bunk in about five minutes."
+
+She waved aside all sympathy.  "Oh, don't bother about me, Mr.
+Pathurst.  Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet,
+and muddy weather, and poison ivy; besides, I'd rather be sea-sick
+than have the hives."
+
+Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some
+stupidity or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire's
+raised voice.  Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors
+that was distinctly unpleasant to the ear.
+
+On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence.
+One, in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.
+
+"Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark," I observed.
+
+Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss
+West's eyes to Mr. Pike's big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles,
+resting on the rail.  It was a stab of hurt to me.  SHE KNEW.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
+table, while the Elsinore rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West
+to her room.
+
+"You won't see her for a couple of days," Captain West told me.  "Her
+mother was the same way--a born sailor, but always sick at the outset
+of a voyage.''
+
+"It's the shaking down."  Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
+observation I had yet heard him utter at table.  "Everybody has to
+shake down when they leave the land.  We've got to forget the good
+times on shore, and the good things money'll buy, and start watch and
+watch, four hours on deck and four below.  And it comes hard, and all
+our tempers are strung until we can make the change.  Did it happen
+that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr.
+Pathurst?"
+
+I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.
+
+"Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
+every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to
+give it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch."
+
+"You don't like the sea?" I queried.
+
+He sighed.
+
+"I don't know.  But of course the sea is all I know--"
+
+"Except music," I threw in.
+
+"Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of
+most of the music I oughta have had coming to me."
+
+"I suppose you've heard Schumann Heink?"
+
+"Wonderful, wonderful!" he murmured fervently, then regarded me with
+an eager wistfulness.  "I've half-a-dozen of her records, and I've
+got the second dog-watch below.  If Captain West don't mind . . . "
+(Captain West nodded that he didn't mind).  "And if you'd want to
+hear them?  The machine is a good one."
+
+And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table,
+this hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered
+waif of the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid
+collection of phonograph records.  These, and the machine, he placed
+on the table.  The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and
+the main cabin into one large room.  It was in the cabin that Captain
+West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the
+phonograph.  His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging
+lamps, and every shade of expression was visible to me.
+
+In vain I waited for him to start some popular song.  His records
+were only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation.
+He handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and
+unwrapping it and brushing it with a fine camel's hair brush while it
+revolved and ere he placed the needle on it.  For a time all I could
+see was the huge brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the
+knuckles, that expressed love in their every movement.  Each touch on
+the discs was a caress, and while the record played he hovered over
+it and dreamed in some heaven of music all his own.
+
+During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar.  His face
+was expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the
+music.  I almost doubted that he heard it.  He made no remarks
+between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure.  He
+seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote.  And while I
+watched him I wondered what his duties were.  I had not seen him
+perform any.  Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship.  Not
+until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board.  I had
+not seen him give an order.  It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr.
+Mellaire did the work.  All Captain West did was to smoke cigars and
+keep blissfully oblivious of the Elsinore's crew.
+
+When Mr. Pike had played the "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah,
+and "He Shall Feed His Flock," he mentioned to me, almost
+apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason,
+perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he
+had been a choir boy.
+
+"And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and
+sneaked off to sea again," he concluded with a harsh laugh.
+
+And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer's "King of
+Heaven," and Mendelssohn's "O Rest in the Lord."
+
+When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all
+carefully wrapped, back into his room.  I lingered with him while he
+rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.
+
+"I've got a lot more good things," he said confidentially:  "Coenen's
+'Come Unto Me,' and Faure's 'Crucifix'; and there's 'O Salutaris,'
+and 'Lead, Kindly Light' by the Trinity Choir; and 'Jesu, Lover of My
+Soul' would just melt your heart.  I'll play 'em for you some night."
+
+"Do you believe in them?" I was led to ask by his rapt expression and
+by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake
+from my consciousness.
+
+He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:
+
+"I do . . . when I'm listening to them."
+
+
+My sleep that night was wretched.  Short of sleep from the previous
+night, I closed my book and turned my light off early.  But scarcely
+had I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of
+my hives.  All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put
+out the light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up.
+Wada had not yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of
+tartar.  It was useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the
+watch changing, I partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown,
+and went up on to the poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours' watch, pacing up and
+down the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man
+at the wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of
+the wheel-house.
+
+Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging
+and lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew,
+and experienced premonitions of disaster.  How could such a voyage be
+possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore, a cargo-carrier
+that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five
+thousand tons of coal?  It was appalling to contemplate.  The voyage
+had gone wrong from the first.  In the wretched unbalance that loss
+of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the
+voyage was doomed.  Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a
+madman could have dreamed.
+
+I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had
+no doubts but what she would always live.  I thought of the killing
+and driving and music-loving Mr. Pike.  Many a haler remnant than he
+had gone down on a last voyage.  As for Captain West, he did not
+count.  He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured
+passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in
+some Nirvana of his own creating.
+
+Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and
+lying gibbering between the steel walls of the 'midship-house.  This
+picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified
+the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew.  Certainly I could go back to
+Baltimore.  Thank God I had the money to humour my whims.  Had not
+Mr. Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the
+running expenses of the Elsinore at two hundred dollars a day?  I
+could afford to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the
+several days that might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a
+pilot tug, or any inbound craft to Baltimore.
+
+I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to
+tell him my decision, when another presented itself:  THEN ARE YOU,
+THE THINKER AND PHILOSOPHER, THE WORLD-SICK ONE, AFRAID TO GO DOWN,
+TO CEASE IN THE DARKNESS?  Bah!  My own pride in my life-
+pridelessness saved Captain West's sleep from interruption.  Of
+course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be
+called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and
+lunatics--and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and
+Semitic ones who had aroused Mr. Pike's ire and who had laughed so
+terribly and silently.
+
+Night thoughts!  Sleepless thoughts!  I dismissed them all and
+started below, chilled through by the cold.  But at the chart-room
+door I encountered Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"A pleasant evening, sir," he greeted me.  "A pity there's not a
+little wind to help us off the land."
+
+"What do you think of the crew?" I asked, after a moment or so.
+
+Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I've seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst.  But I never
+saw one as queer as this--boys, old men, cripples and--you saw Tony
+the Greek go overboard yesterday?  Well, that's only the beginning.
+He's a sample.  I've got a big Irishman in my watch who's going bad.
+Did you notice a little, dried-up Scotchman?"
+
+"Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the
+evening before last?"
+
+"The very one--Andy Fay.  Well, Andy Fay's just been complaining to
+me about O'Sullivan.  Says O'Sullivan's threatened his life.  When
+Andy Fay went off watch at eight he found O'Sullivan stropping a
+razor.  I'll give you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:
+
+"'Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?"
+"Certainly," says I; "what can I do for you?"  "Sell me your sea-
+boots, Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be.  "But what will
+you be wantin' of them?" says I.  "'Twill be a great favour," says
+O'Sullivan.  "But it's my only pair," says I; "and you have a pair of
+your own," says I.  "Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather,"
+says O'Sullivan.  "Besides," says I, "you have no money."  "I'll pay
+for them when we pay off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan.  "I'll not do
+it," says I; "besides, you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin'
+with them."  "But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to
+throw 'em over the side."  And with that I turns to walk away, but
+O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the
+razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you kindly step this way an' have
+your throat cut?"  And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I
+have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent
+lunatic.'
+
+"Or soon will be," I remarked.  "I noticed him yesterday, a big man
+muttering continually to himself?"
+
+"That's the man," Mr. Mellaire said.
+
+"Do you have many such at sea?" I asked.
+
+"More than my share, I do believe, sir."
+
+He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement
+he pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing
+match that I might see.
+
+I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald,
+but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs.  And full across
+this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran
+the most prodigious scar I had ever seen.  Because the vision of it
+was so fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar's
+very prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have
+sworn that I could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and
+that it was fully two fingers broad.  There seemed no bone at all,
+just a great fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was
+confident that the brain pulsed immediately under that skin.
+
+He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.
+
+"A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe.  We were
+thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the
+time, running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his
+addled head that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn't
+let him go ashore.  I had my back to him at the time, and I never
+knew what struck me."
+
+"But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?" I questioned.
+"There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have
+had wonderful vitality."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses."
+
+"Molasses!"
+
+"Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics.
+He always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings.  I lay in my bunk
+many weary weeks--we had a long passage--and by the time we reached
+Hong Kong the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore
+surgeon, and I was standing my third mate's watch--we carried third
+mates in those days."
+
+Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in
+Mr. Mellaire's head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of
+the Elsinore.  Had I known at the time, Captain West would have
+received the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever
+experienced; for he would have been routed out by a very determined,
+partially-dressed passenger with a proposition capable of going to
+the extent of buying the Elsinore outright with all her cargo, so
+that she might be sailed straight back to Baltimore.
+
+As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr.
+Mellaire should have lived so many years with such a hole in his
+head.
+
+We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular
+happening, and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics
+that seem to infest the sea.
+
+And yet I could not like the man.  In nothing he said, nor in the
+manner of saying things, could I find fault.  He seemed generous,
+broad-minded, and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world.  It
+was easy for me to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and
+super-courtesy of social mannerism.  It was not that.  But all the
+time I was distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though
+in the darkness I couldn't even see his eyes, that there, behind
+those eyes, inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality
+that spied upon me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing
+while it thought another thing.
+
+When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I
+had been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature.
+The other half had not spoken.  Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and
+quick, behind the mask of words and flesh.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+But I could not sleep.  I took more cream of tartar.  It must be the
+heat of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives.  And yet,
+whenever I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and
+read, my skin irritation decreased.  But as soon as I turned out the
+lamp and closed my eyes I was troubled again.  So hour after hour
+passed, through which, between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to
+wade through many pages of Rosny's Le Termite--a not very cheerful
+proceeding, I must say, concerned as it is with the microscopic and
+over-elaborate recital of Noel Servaise's tortured nerves, bodily
+pains, and intellectual phantasma.  At last I tossed the novel aside,
+damned all analytical Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in
+the more genial and cynical Stendhal.
+
+Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down.  At
+four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike's
+promenade.  Half an hour later, just as the steward's alarm went off,
+instantly checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the Elsinore began
+to heel over on my side.  I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling
+orders, and at times a trample and shuffle of many feet passed over
+my head as the weird crew pulled and hauled.  The Elsinore continued
+to heel over until I could see the water against my port, and then
+she gathered way and dashed ahead at such a rate that I could hear
+the stinging and singing of the foam through the circle of thick
+glass beside me.
+
+The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after,
+when Wada served me breakfast and helped me dress.  He, too,
+complained of inability to sleep.  He had been bunked with Nancy in
+one of the rooms in the 'midship-house.  Wada described the
+situation.  The tiny room, made of steel, was air-tight when the
+steel door was closed.  And Nancy insisted on keeping the door
+closed.  As a result Wada, in the upper bunk, had stifled.  He told
+me that the air had got so bad that the flame of the lamp, no matter
+how high it was turned, guttered down and all but refused to burn.
+Nancy snored beautifully through it all, while he had been unable to
+close his eyes.
+
+"He is not clean," quoth Wada.  "He is a pig.  No more will I sleep
+in that place."
+
+On the poop I found the Elsinore, with many of her sails furled,
+slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky.  Also I
+found Mr. Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours
+before, and it took quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he
+had had the watch off between four and eight.  Even then, he told me,
+he had slept from four until half-past seven.
+
+"That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . .
+which means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience."
+
+And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that
+that alien thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.
+
+In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible.  Miss
+West did not appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the
+curse of sea-sickness had not been added.
+
+Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place
+for himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the
+corner with a solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.
+
+It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain
+and a persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of
+water across the deck.  With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which
+gave for'ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors,
+whenever they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and
+through by the boarding seas.  Several times I saw some of them taken
+off their feet and rolled about in the creaming foam.  And yet,
+erect, unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among
+these rolled men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr.
+Pike or Mr. Mellaire.  They were never taken off their feet.  They
+never shrank away from a splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-
+falling water.  They had fed on different food, were informed with a
+different spirit, were of iron in contrast with the poor miserables
+they drove to their bidding.
+
+In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in
+the cabin.  Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I
+could have slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble.
+Captain West, stretched out on the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet
+slippers, slept enviably.  By some instinct, I might say, in the deep
+of sleep, he kept his place and was not rolled off upon the floor.
+Also, he lightly held a half-smoked cigar in one hand.  I watched him
+for an hour, and knew him to be asleep, and marvelled that he
+maintained his easy posture and did not drop the cigar.
+
+After dinner there was no phonograph.  The second dog-watch was Mr.
+Pike's on deck.  Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too
+severe.  It would make the needle jump and scratch his beloved
+records.
+
+And no sleep!  Another weary night of torment, and another dreary,
+overcast day and leaden, troubled sea.  And no Miss West.  Wada, too,
+is sea-sick, although heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend
+on me with glassy, unseeing eyes.  I sent him to his bunk, and read
+through the endless hours until my eyes were tired, and my brain,
+between lack of sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.
+
+Captain West is no conversationalist.  The more I see of him the more
+I am baffled.  I have not yet found a reason for that first
+impression I received of him.  He has all the poise and air of a
+remote and superior being, and yet I wonder if it be not poise and
+air and nothing else.  Just as I had expected, that first meeting,
+ere he spoke a word, to hear fall from his lips words of untold
+beneficence and wisdom, and then heard him utter mere social
+commonplaces, so I now find myself almost forced to conclude that his
+touch of race, and beak of power, and all the tall, aristocratic
+slenderness of him have nothing behind them.
+
+And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that
+first impression.  He has not shown any strength, but by the same
+token he has not shown any weakness.  Sometimes I wonder what resides
+behind those clear blue eyes.  Certainly I have failed to find any
+intellectual backing.  I tried him out with William James' Varieties
+of Religious Experience.  He glanced at a few pages, then returned it
+to me with the frank statement that it did not interest him.  He has
+no books of his own.  Evidently he is not a reader.  Then what is he?
+I dared to feel him out on politics.  He listened courteously, said
+sometimes yes and sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very
+discouragement, said nothing.
+
+Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still
+more aloof from his officers.  I have not seen him address a further
+word to Mr. Mellaire than "Good morning" on the poop.  As for Mr.
+Pike, who eats three times a day with him, scarcely any more
+conversation obtains between them.  And I am surprised by what seems
+the very conspicuous awe with which Mr. Pike seems to regard his
+commander.
+
+Another thing.  What are Captain West's duties?  So far he has done
+nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day
+stroll a total of one mile around the poop.  The mates do all the
+work, and hard work it is, four hours on deck and four below, day and
+night with never a variation.  I watch Captain West and am amazed.
+He will loll back in the cabin and stare straight before him for
+hours at a time, until I am almost frantic to demand of him what are
+his thoughts.  Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all.  I give
+him up.  I cannot fathom him.
+
+Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across
+the deck.  I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with
+five thousand tons of coal around the Horn is more serious than I had
+thought.  So deep is the Elsinore in the water that she is like a log
+awash.  Her tall, six-foot bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas
+from boarding her.  She has not the buoyancy one is accustomed to
+ascribe to ships.  On the contrary, she is weighted down until she is
+dead, so that, for this one day alone, I am appalled at the thought
+of how many thousands of tons of the North Atlantic have boarded her
+and poured out through her spouting scuppers and clanging ports.
+
+Yes, a depressing day.  The two mates have alternated on deck and in
+their bunks.  Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the
+Bible.  Miss West is still sea-sick.  I have tired myself out with
+reading, and the fuzziness of my unsleeping brain makes for
+melancholy.  Even Wada is anything but a cheering spectacle, crawling
+out of his bunk, as he does at stated intervals, and with sick,
+glassy eyes trying to discern what my needs may be.  I almost wish I
+could get sea-sick myself.  I had never dreamed that a sea voyage
+could be so unenlivening as this one is proving.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the Elsinore,
+under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from
+her scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic.
+And I have failed to sleep half-an-hour all told.  At this rate, in a
+very short time I shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the
+ship.  I never have had hives like these before.  I can't understand
+it.  So long as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled.  The
+instant I put out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and
+the lumps on my skin begin to form.
+
+Miss West may be sea-sick, but she cannot be comatose, because at
+frequent intervals she sends the steward to me with more cream of
+tartar.
+
+I have had a revelation to-day.  I have discovered Captain West.  He
+is a Samurai.--You remember the Samurai that H. G. Wells describes in
+his Modern Utopia--the superior breed of men who know things and are
+masters of life and of their fellow-men in a super-benevolent, super-
+wise way?  Well, that is what Captain West is.  Let me tell it to
+you.
+
+We had a shift of wind to-day.  In the height of a south-west gale
+the wind shifted, in the instant, eight points, which is equivalent
+to a quarter of the circle.  Imagine it!  Imagine a gale howling from
+out of the south-west.  And then imagine the wind, in a heavier and
+more violent gale, abruptly smiting you from the north-west.  We had
+been sailing through a circular storm, Captain West vouchsafed to me,
+before the event, and the wind could be expected to box the compass.
+
+Clad in sea-boots, oilskins and sou'wester, I had for some time been
+hanging upon the rail at the break of the poop, staring down
+fascinated at the poor devils of sailors, repeatedly up to their
+necks in water, or submerged, or dashed like straws about the deck,
+while they pulled and hauled, stupidly, blindly, and in evident fear,
+under the orders of Mr. Pike.
+
+Mr. Pike was with them, working them and working with them.  He took
+every chance they took, yet somehow he escaped being washed off his
+feet, though several times I saw him entirely buried from view.
+There was more than luck in the matter; for I saw him, twice, at the
+head of a line of the men, himself next to the pin.  And twice, in
+this position, I saw the North Atlantic curl over the rail and fall
+upon them.  And each time he alone remained, holding the turn of the
+rope on the pin, while the rest of them were rolled and sprawled
+helplessly away.
+
+Almost it seemed to me good fun, as at a circus, watching their
+antics.  But I did not apprehend the seriousness of the situation
+until, the wind screaming higher than ever and the sea a-smoke and
+white with wrath, two men did not get up from the deck.  One was
+carried away for'ard with a broken leg--it was Iare Jacobson, a dull-
+witted Scandinavian; and the other, Kid Twist, was carried away,
+unconscious, with a bleeding scalp.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did
+not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to
+escape being blown away.  My face was stung to severe pain by the
+high-driving spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing
+the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain.
+
+And all the time, slender, aristocratic, graceful in streaming
+oilskins, in apparent unconcern, giving no orders, effortlessly
+accommodating his body to the violent rolling of the Elsinore,
+Captain West strolled up and down.
+
+It was at this stage in the gale that he unbent sufficiently to tell
+me that we were going through a circular storm and that the wind was
+boxing the compass.  I did notice that he kept his gaze pretty
+steadily fixed on the overcast, cloud-driven sky.  At last, when it
+seemed the wind could not possibly blow more fiercely, he found in
+the sky what he sought.  It was then that I first heard his voice--a
+sea-voice, clear as a bell, distinct as silver, and of an ineffable
+sweetness and volume, as it might be the trump of Gabriel.  That
+voice!--effortless, dominating!  The mighty threat of the storm, made
+articulate by the resistance of the Elsinore, shouted in all the
+stays, bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the
+steel masts, and from the myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a
+devil's chorus of shrill pipings and screechings.  And yet, through
+this bedlam of noise, came Captain West's voice, as of a spirit
+visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all music and mighty as an
+archangel's call to judgment.  And it carried understanding and
+command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep in the
+wash of sea below us.  And the man at the wheel obeyed, and Mr. Pike
+obeyed, barking and snarling orders to the poor wallowing devils who
+wallowed on and obeyed him in turn.  And as the voice was the face.
+This face I had never seen before.  It was the face of the spirit
+visitant, chaste with wisdom, lighted by a splendour of power and
+calm.  Perhaps it was the calm that smote me most of all.  It was as
+the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men with
+the word that all was well.  It was not the face of the fighter.  To
+my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all
+strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of the blood.
+
+The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings
+of the storm, directing the gigantic, labouring Elsinore in all her
+intricate massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will,
+which was the will of wisdom.
+
+And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his
+creatures laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more
+slenderly tall and aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins,
+Captain West touched my shoulder and pointed astern over our weather
+quarter.  I looked, and all that I could see was a vague smoke of sea
+and air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at the ocean's breast.  And
+at the same moment the gale from the south-west ceased.  There was no
+gale, no moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.
+
+"What is it?" I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation
+of wind.
+
+"The shift," he said.  "There she comes."
+
+And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an
+atmospheric impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the
+Elsinore harp protest.  It forced me down on the rail.  I was like a
+windle-straw.  As I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the
+air back into my lungs, so that I suffocated and turned my head aside
+to breathe in the lee of the draught.  The man at the wheel again
+listened to the Gabriel voice; and Mr. Pike, on the deck below,
+listened and repeated the will of the voice; and Captain West, in
+slender and stately balance, leaned into the face of the wind and
+slowly paced the deck.
+
+It was magnificent.  Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and
+the men who overlord the sea.  Captain West had vindicated himself,
+exposited himself.  At the height and crisis of storm he had taken
+charge of the Elsinore, and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was
+all he was, the foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves,
+serving the one from beyond--the Samurai.
+
+A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning
+easily into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his
+back against it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his
+hand on the knob of the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring
+look at the storm-white sea and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.
+
+Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in
+and saw him.  Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in
+carpet slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big
+leather chair smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-
+seeing--or, if they saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls
+and beyond my ken.  I have developed an immense respect for Captain
+West, though now I know him less than the little I thought I knew him
+before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this,
+which has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the
+selectest and most mountainous brands of cross-seas.  The way the
+poor Elsinore pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her
+lofty spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight
+cargo, is astonishing.  To me she is the most erratic thing
+imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion,
+tells me that coal is a good cargo, and that the Elsinore is well-
+loaded because he saw to it himself.
+
+He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in
+order to watch her in her maddest antics.  The sight is very pleasant
+to him, for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his
+face and impart to it a hint of ecstasy.  The Elsinore has a snug
+place in his heart, I am confident.  He calls her behaviour
+admirable, and at such times will repeat to me that it was he who saw
+to her loading.
+
+It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life
+on the sea, to the motion of the sea.  There IS a rhythm to this
+chaos of crossing, buffeting waves.  I sense this rhythm, although I
+cannot solve it.  But Mr. Pike KNOWS it.  Again and again, as we
+paced up and down this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic
+seemed impending, he would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the
+Elsinore smashed down on her side and heeled over and over with a
+colossal roll that seemed never to end, and that always ended with an
+abrupt, snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the corresponding roll
+to windward.  In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these
+antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously
+forecast them at all.  He FEELS them; he knows them.  They, and the
+sea, are ingrained in him.
+
+Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
+shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw.  If ever, in
+an hour, the Elsinore had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I
+had not noticed it.  So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the
+next moment the Elsinore had smashed down and buried a couple of
+hundred feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot
+down the deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the
+chart-house.  My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet.  Now how
+did he know?
+
+And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away.  On
+the contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time
+and again he lent his surplus to me.  I begin to have more respect,
+not for the sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the
+sweepings of seamen that are as slaves on our decks, but for the real
+seamen who are their masters--for Captain West, for Mr. Pike, yes,
+and for Mr. Mellaire, dislike him as I do.
+
+As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back
+to the south-west.  Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and
+reported the change to Captain West.
+
+"We'll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst," the second mate told me when
+he came back.  "You'll find it an interesting manoeuvre."
+
+"But why wait till four?" I asked.
+
+"The Captain's orders, sir.  The watches will be changing, and we'll
+have the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the watch
+below by calling it out now."
+
+And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins,
+came out of the chart-house.  Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took
+charge of the many men who, on deck and on the poop, were to manage
+the mizzen-braces, while Mr. Mellaire went for'ard with his watch to
+handle the fore-and main-braces.  It was a pretty manoeuvre, a play
+of leverages, by which they cased the force of the wind on the after
+part of the Elsinore and used the force of the wind on the for'ard
+part.
+
+Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite
+oblivious of what was being done.  He was again the favoured
+passenger, taking a stroll for his health's sake.  And yet I knew
+that both his officers were uncomfortably aware of his presence and
+were keyed to their finest seamanship.  I know, now, Captain West's
+position on board.  He is the brains of the Elsinore.  He is the
+master strategist.  There is more in directing a ship on the ocean
+than in standing watches and ordering men to pull and haul.  They are
+pawns, and the two officers are pieces, with which Captain West plays
+the game against sea, and wind, and season, and ocean current.  He is
+the knower.  They are his tongue, by which he makes his knowledge
+articulate.
+
+
+A bad night--equally bad for the Elsinore and for me.  She is
+receiving a sharp buffeting at the hands of the wintry North
+Atlantic.  I fell asleep early, exhausted from lack of sleep, and
+awoke in an hour, frantic with my lumped and burning skin.  More
+cream of tartar, more reading, more vain attempts to sleep, until
+shortly before five, when the steward brought me my coffee, I wrapped
+myself in my dressing-gown, and like a being distracted prowled into
+the cabin.  I dozed in a leather chair and was thrown out by a
+violent roll of the ship.  I tried the sofa, sinking to sleep
+immediately, and immediately thereafter finding myself precipitated
+to the floor.  I am convinced that when Captain West naps on the sofa
+he is only half asleep.  How else can he maintain so precarious a
+position?--unless, in him, too, the sea and its motion be ingrained.
+
+I wandered into the dining-room, wedged myself into a screwed chair,
+and fell asleep, my head on my arms, my arms on the table.  And at
+quarter past seven the steward roused me by shaking my shoulders.  It
+was time to set table.
+
+Heavy with the brief heaviness of sleep I had had, I dressed and
+stumbled up on to the poop in the hope that the wind would clear my
+brain.  Mr. Pike had the watch, and with sure, age-lagging step he
+paced the deck.  The man is a marvel--sixty-nine years old, a life of
+hardship, and as sturdy as a lion.  Yet of the past night alone his
+hours had been:  four to six in the afternoon on deck; eight to
+twelve on deck; and four to eight in the morning on deck.  In a few
+minutes he would be relieved, but at midday he would again be on
+deck.
+
+I leaned on the poop-rail and stared for'ard along the dreary waste
+of deck.  Every port and scupper was working to ease the weight of
+North Atlantic that perpetually fell on board.  Between the rush of
+the cascades, streaks of rust showed everywhere.  Some sort of a
+wooden pin-rail had carried away on the starboard-rail at the foot of
+the mizzen-shrouds, and an amazing raffle of ropes and tackles washed
+about.  Here Nancy and half-a-dozen men worked sporadically, and in
+fear of their lives, to clear the tangle.
+
+The long-suffering bleakness was very pronounced on Nancy's face, and
+when the walls of water, in impending downfall, reared above the
+Elsinore's rail, he was always the first to leap for the life-line
+which had been stretched fore and aft across the wide space of deck.
+
+The rest of the men were scarcely less backward in dropping their
+work and springing to safety--if safety it might be called, to grip a
+rope in both hands and have legs sweep out from under, and be
+wrenched full-length upon the boiling surface of an ice-cold flood.
+Small wonder they look wretched.  Bad as their condition was when
+they came aboard at Baltimore, they look far worse now, what of the
+last several days of wet and freezing hardship.
+
+From time to time, completing his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr.
+Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee
+at what happened to the poor devils below.  The man's heart is
+callous.  A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor
+sympathy with these creatures who lack his own excessive iron.
+
+I noticed the stone-deaf man, the twisted oaf whose face I have
+described as being that of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun.
+His bright, liquid, pain-filled eyes were more filled with pain than
+ever, his face still more lean and drawn with suffering.  And yet his
+face showed an excess of nervousness, sensitiveness, and a pathetic
+eagerness to please and do.  I could not help observing that, despite
+his dreadful sense-handicap and his wrecked, frail body, he did the
+most work, was always the last of the group to spring to the life-
+line and always the first to loose the life-line and slosh knee-deep
+or waist-deep through the churning water to attack the immense and
+depressing tangle of rope and tackle.
+
+I remarked to Mr. Pike that the men seemed thinner and weaker than
+when they came on board, and he delayed replying for a moment while
+he stared down at them with that cattle-buyer's eye of his.
+
+"Sure they are," he said disgustedly.  "A weak breed, that's what
+they are--nothing to build on, no stamina.  The least thing drags
+them down.  Why, in my day we grew fat on work like that--only we
+didn't; we worked so hard there wasn't any chance for fat.  We kept
+in fighting trim, that was all.  But as for this scum and slum--say,
+you remember, Mr. Pathurst, that man I spoke to the first day, who
+said his name was Charles Davis?"
+
+"The one you thought there was something the matter with?"
+
+"Yes, and there was, too.  He's in that 'midship room with the Greek
+now.  He'll never do a tap of work the whole Voyage.  He's a hospital
+case, if there ever was one.  Talk about shot to pieces!  He's got
+holes in him I could shove my fist through.  I don't know whether
+they're perforating ulcers, or cancers, or cannon-shot wounds, or
+what not.  And he had the nerve to tell me they showed up after he
+came on board!"
+
+"And he had them all the time?" I asked.
+
+"All the time!  Take my word, Mr. Pathurst, they're years old.  But
+he's a wonder.  I watched him those first days, sent him aloft, had
+him down in the fore-hold trimming a few tons of coal, did everything
+to him, and he never showed a wince.  Being up to the neck in the
+salt water finally fetched him, and now he's reported off duty--for
+the voyage.  And he'll draw his wages for the whole time, have all
+night in, and never do a tap.  Oh, he's a hot one to have passed over
+on us, and the Elsinore's another man short."
+
+"Another!" I exclaimed.  "Is the Greek going to die?"
+
+"No fear.  I'll have him steering in a few days.  I refer to the
+misfits.  If we rolled a dozen of them together they wouldn't make
+one real man.  I'm not saying it to alarm you, for there's nothing
+alarming about it; but we're going to have proper hell this voyage."
+He broke off to stare reflectively at his broken knuckles, as if
+estimating how much drive was left in them, then sighed and
+concluded, "Well, I can see I've got my work cut out for me."
+
+Sympathizing with Mr. Pike is futile; the only effect is to make his
+mood blacker.  I tried it, and he retaliated with:
+
+"You oughta see the bloke with curvature of the spine in Mr.
+Mellaire's watch.  He's a proper hobo, too, and a land lubber, and
+don't weigh more'n a hundred pounds, and must be fifty years old, and
+he's got curvature of the spine, and he's able seaman, if you please,
+on the Elsinore.  And worse than all that, he puts it over on you;
+he's nasty, he's mean, he's a viper, a wasp.  He ain't afraid of
+anything because he knows you dassent hit him for fear of croaking
+him.  Oh, he's a pearl of purest ray serene, if anybody should slide
+down a backstay and ask you.  If you fail to identify him any other
+way, his name is Mulligan Jacobs."
+
+
+After breakfast, again on deck, in Mr. Mellaire's watch, I discovered
+another efficient.  He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular
+man of say forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big
+eagle-face, swarthy, with keen, intelligent black eyes.
+
+Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the
+best sailor in his watch, a proper seaman.  When he referred to the
+man as the Maltese Cockney, and I asked why, he replied:
+
+"First, because he is Maltese, Mr. Pathurst; and next, because he
+talks Cockney like a native.  And depend upon it, he heard Bow Bells
+before he lisped his first word."
+
+"And has O'Sullivan bought Andy Fay's sea-boots yet?" I queried.
+
+It was at this moment that Miss West emerged upon the poop.  She was
+as rosy and vital as ever, and certainly, if she had been sea-sick,
+she flew no signals of it.  As she came toward me, greeting me, I
+could not help remarking again the lithe and springy limb-movement
+with which she walked, and her fine, firm skin.  Her neck, free in a
+sailor collar, with white sweater open at the throat, seemed almost
+redoubtably strong to my sleepless, jaundiced eyes.  Her hair, under
+a white knitted cap, was smooth and well-groomed.  In fact, the
+totality of impression she conveyed was of a well-groomedness one
+would not expect of a sea-captain's daughter, much less of a woman
+who had been sea-sick.  Life!--that is the key of her, the essential
+note of her--life and health.  I'll wager she has never entertained a
+morbid thought in that practical, balanced, sensible head of hers.
+
+"And how have you been?" she asked, then rattled on with sheer
+exuberance ere I could answer.  "Had a lovely night's sleep.  I was
+really over my sickness yesterday, but I just devoted myself to
+resting up.  I slept ten solid hours--what do you think of that?"
+
+"I wish I could say the same," I replied with appropriate dejection,
+as I swung in beside her, for she had evinced her intention of
+promenading.
+
+"Oh, then you've been sick?"
+
+"On the contrary," I answered dryly.  "And I wish I had been.  I
+haven't had five hours' sleep all told since I came on board.  These
+pestiferous hives.
+
+I held up a lumpy wrist to show.  She took one glance at it, halted
+abruptly, and, neatly balancing herself to the roll, took my wrist in
+both her hands and gave it close scrutiny.
+
+"Mercy!" she cried; and then began to laugh.
+
+I was of two minds.  Her laughter was delightful to the ear, there
+was such a mellowness, and healthiness, and frankness about it.  On
+the other hand, that it should be directed at my misfortune was
+exasperating.  I suppose my perplexity showed in my face, for when
+she had eased her laughter and looked at me with a sobering
+countenance, she immediately went off into more peals.
+
+"You poor child," she gurgled at last.  "And when I think of all the
+cream of tartar I made you consume!"
+
+It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to
+take advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain
+just how many years she was my junior.  She had told me she was
+twelve years old the time the Dixie collided with the river steamer
+in San Francisco Bay.  Very well, all I had to do was to ascertain
+the date of that disaster and I had her.  But in the meantime she
+laughed at me and my hives.
+
+"I suppose it is--er--humorous, in some sort of way," I said a bit
+stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss
+West, for it only set her off into more laughter.
+
+"What you needed," she announced, with fresh gurglings, "was an
+exterior treatment."
+
+"Don't tell me I've got the chicken-pox or the measles," I protested.
+
+"No."  She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another
+paroxysm.  "What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . "
+
+She paused deliberately, and looked me straight the eyes.
+
+"Of bedbugs," she concluded.  And then, all seriousness and
+practicality, she went on:  "But we'll have that righted in a jiffy.
+I'll turn the Elsinore's after-quarters upside down, though I know
+there are none in father's room or mine.  And though this is my first
+voyage with Mr. Pike I know he's too hard-bitten" (here I laughed at
+her involuntary pun) "an old sailor not to know that his room is
+clean.  Yours" (I was perturbed for fear she was going to say that I
+had brought them on board) "have most probably drifted in from
+for'ard.  They always have them for'ard.
+
+"And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case.
+You'd better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you.  The
+next couple of nights you'll spend in the cabin or chart-room.  And
+be sure Wada removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from
+your rooms.  There's going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing
+out of woodwork, and rebuilding.  Trust me.  I know the vermin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+
+Such a cleaning up and turning over!  For two nights, one in the
+chart-room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep,
+and I am now almost stupid with excess of sleep.  The land seems very
+far away.  By some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or
+months, have passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March
+morning.  And yet it was March 28, and this is only the first week in
+April.
+
+I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West.  She is the
+most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered.
+What passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it
+was, she was convinced that he was not the erring one.  In some
+strange way, my two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded
+by this plague of vermin.  Under Miss West's instructions bunks,
+drawers, shelves, and all superficial woodwork have been ripped out.
+She worked the carpenter from daylight till dark, and then, after a
+night of fumigation, two of the sailors, with turpentine and white
+lead, put the finishing touches on the cleansing operations.  The
+carpenter is now busy rebuilding my rooms.  Then will come the
+painting, and in two or three more days I expect to be settled back
+in my quarters.
+
+Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been
+four.  Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up
+to the work.  The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his
+name, is an interesting fellow.  I talked with him quite a bit ere
+Miss West sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real
+sailor.
+
+This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea.  How he
+happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did
+not explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
+Elsinore.  But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
+the sea.  He is a small man, but most powerfully built.  His
+shoulders are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and
+yet he is slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked.  This
+last, however, is not due to sickness or ill-health.  Tyro as he is
+on the sea, Steve Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and
+crooked.  He has a way of looking straight at one with utmost
+frankness while he talks, and yet it is at such moments I get most
+strongly the impression of crookedness.  But he is a man, if trouble
+should arise, to be reckoned with.  In ways he suggests a kinship
+with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a prejudice against--Kid
+Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  And I have already noticed, in
+the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve Roberts chums.
+
+The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him
+work for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with
+curvature of the spine.  But before she sent him packing other things
+occurred in which I was concerned.  I was in the room when Mulligan
+Jacobs first came in to go to work, and I could not help observing
+the startled, avid glance he threw at my big shelves of books.  He
+advanced on them in the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard
+of gold, and as a miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled
+these book-titles with his eyes.
+
+And such eyes!  All time bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me
+the man possessed was there in his eyes.  They were small, pale-blue,
+and gimlet-pointed with fire.  His eyelids were inflamed, and but
+served to ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the
+pupils.  The man was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in
+learning that he hated all things except books.
+
+"Would you care to read some of them?" I said hospitably.
+
+All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his
+head to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
+
+"It's hell, ain't it?--you with a strong body and servants to carry
+for you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that
+puts the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?"
+
+How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he
+uttered these words?  I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down
+the hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of
+safety.  Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same
+as if I were locked in a cage with a tiger-cat.  The devilishness,
+the wickedness, and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with
+which the man eyed me and addressed me, were most unpleasant.  I
+swear I knew fear--not calculated caution, not timid apprehension,
+but blind, panic, unreasoned terror.  The malignancy of the creature
+was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it:  it poured
+from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered,
+twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of
+hands.  And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
+repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take
+the throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
+malformed life out of it.
+
+But there was little encouragement in such thought--no more than a
+man might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for,
+crush them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink
+their poison into him.  And so with this Mulligan Jacobs.  My fear of
+him was the fear of being infected with his venom.  I could not help
+it; for I caught a quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had
+seen in his mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with
+their acid, destroying me.
+
+One thing was very clear.  In the creature was no fear.  Absolutely,
+he did not know fear.  He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one
+treads underfoot in nightmares.  Lord, Lord! that is what the thing
+was, a nightmare.
+
+"You suffer pain often?" I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by
+the calculated use of sympathy.
+
+"The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an'
+burn," was his reply.  "But by what damnable right do you have all
+these books, and time to read 'em, an' all night in to read 'em, an'
+soak in them, when me brain's on fire, and I'm watch and watch, an'
+me broken spine won't let me carry half a hundredweight of books
+about with me?"
+
+Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
+modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him
+what were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what
+were the writers he preferred.  His library, he told me, among other
+things included, first and f ore-most, a complete Byron.  Next was a
+complete Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume.  A full
+hall-dozen he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of
+Lecky, Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, several of Carlyle, and
+eight or ten of Zola.  Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a
+prime favourite.
+
+He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently
+mad from any madman I had ever encountered.  I talked on with him
+about books and bookmen.  He was most universal and particular.  He
+liked O. Henry.  George Moore was a cad and a four--flusher.  Edgar
+Saltus' Anatomy of Negation was profounder than Kant.  Maeterlinck
+was a mystic frump.  Emerson was a charlatan.  Ibsen's Ghosts was the
+stuff, though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler.  Heine was the real
+goods.  He preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to
+Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling.  John
+Masefield knew what he was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was
+living too fat to turn out the stuff he first turned out.
+
+And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I
+had ever heard.  I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on
+sociology.  Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no
+anarchist.  On the other hand, political action was a blind-alley
+leading to reformism and quietism.  Political socialism had gone to
+pot, while industrial unionism was the logical culmination of
+Marxism.  He was a direct actionist.  The mass strike was the thing.
+Sabotage, not merely as a withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen
+destruction-of-profits policy, was the weapon.  Of course he believed
+in the propaganda of the deed, but a man was a fool to talk about it.
+His job was to do it and keep his mouth shut, and the way to do it
+was to shoot the evidence.  Of course, HE talked; but what of it?
+Didn't he have curvature of the spine?  He didn't care when he got
+his, and woe to the man who tried to give it to him.
+
+And while he talked he hated me.  He seemed to hate the things he
+talked about and espoused.  I judged him to be of Irish descent, and
+it was patent that he was self-educated.  When I asked him how it was
+he had come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as
+hot one place as another.  He unbent enough to tell me that he had
+been an athlete, when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer
+in Eastern Canada.  And then his disease had come upon him, and for a
+quarter of a century he had been a common tramp and vagabond, and he
+bragged of a personal acquaintance with more city prisons and county
+jails than any man that ever existed.
+
+It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into
+the doorway.  He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most
+sour look of disapprobation.  Mr. Pike's countenance is almost
+petrified.  Any expression seems to crack it--with the exception of
+sourness.  But when Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty
+at all.  His hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness.
+Evidently he condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs's time.  To
+Mulligan Jacobs he said in his customary snarl:
+
+"Go on an' get to your work.  Chew the rag in your watch below."
+
+And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs.  The venom of hatred I
+had already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now
+was manifested.  I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold
+weather, did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.
+
+"Aw, go to hell, you old stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+If ever I had seen murder in a man s eyes, I saw it then in the
+mate's.  He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand
+not open but clenched.  One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan
+Jacobs and all the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in
+the everlasting darkness.  But he was unafraid.  Like a cornered rat,
+like a rattlesnake on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he
+faced the irate giant.  More than that.  He even thrust his face
+forward on its twisted neck to meet the blow.
+
+It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that
+frail, crippled, repulsive thing.
+
+"It's me that can call you the stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.  "I
+ain't no Larry.  G'wan an' hit me.  Why don't you hit me?"
+
+And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature.  He, whose
+whole career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a
+shambles, could not strike this fractured splinter of a man.  I swear
+that Mr. Pike actually struggled with himself to strike.  I saw it.
+But he could not.
+
+"Go on to your work," he ordered.  "The voyage is young yet,
+Mulligan.  I'll have you eatin' outa my hand before it's over."
+
+And Mulligan Jacobs's face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
+neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
+into incandescence.  So immense and tremendous was the bitterness
+that consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it.  All he
+could do was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should
+not have been surprised had he spat poison in the mate's face.
+
+And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
+beaten.
+
+
+I can't get it out of my mind.  The picture of the mate and the
+cripple facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids.  This is
+different from the books and from what I know of existence.  It is
+revelation.  Life is a profoundly amazing thing.  What is this bitter
+flame that informs Mulligan Jacobs?  How dare he--with no hope of any
+profit, not a hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to
+God, but a mere filthy, malignant rat--how dare he, I ask myself, be
+so defiant, so death-inviting?  The spectacle of him makes me doubt
+all the schools of the metaphysicians and the realists.  No
+philosophy has a leg to stand on that does not account for Mulligan
+Jacobs.  And all the midnight oil of philosophy I have burned does
+not enable me to account for Mulligan Jacobs . . . unless he be
+insane.  And then I don't know.
+
+Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these
+humans with whom I am herded on the Elsinore?
+
+
+And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is
+another one of them.  I have learned his name.  It is Arthur Deacon.
+He is the pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when
+the men were routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass--the
+man I so instantly adjudged a drug-fiend.  He certainly looks it.
+
+I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.
+
+"White slaver," was his answer.  "Had to skin outa New York to save
+his skin.  He'll be consorting with those other three larrakins I
+gave a piece of my mind to."
+
+"And what do you make of them?" I asked.
+
+"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
+committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin'
+for 'em right now.  I'd like to have the cash somebody's put up in
+New York to send them on this get-away.  Oh, I know the breed."
+
+"Gangsters?" I queried.
+
+"That's what.  But I'll trim their dirty hides.  I'll trim 'em.  Mr.
+Pathurst, this voyage ain't started yet, and this old stiff's a long
+way from his last legs.  I'll give them a run for their money.  Why,
+I've buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft.  And
+I'll bury some of them that think me an old stiff."
+
+He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst, I've heard you're a writing man.  And when they told
+me at the agents' you were going along passenger, I made a point of
+going to see your play.  Now I'm not saying anything about that play,
+one way or the other.  But I just want to tell you, that as a writing
+man you'll get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage.  Hell's
+going to pop, believe me, and right here before you is the stiff
+that'll do a lot of the poppin'.  Some several and plenty's going to
+learn who's an old stiff."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+How I have been sleeping!  This relief of renewed normality is
+delicious--thanks to Miss West.  Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
+Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me?  And then
+there was Wada.  But no; it required Miss West.  Again I contemplate
+the problem of woman.  It is just such an incident among a million
+others that keeps the thinker's gaze fixed on woman.  They truly are
+the mothers and the conservers of the race.
+
+Rail as I will at Miss West's red-blood complacency of life, yet I
+must bow my head to her life-giving to me.  Practical, sensible,
+hard-headed, a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the
+distressing attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother,
+nevertheless I must confess I am most grateful that she is along.
+Had she not been on the Elsinore, by this time I should have been so
+overwrought from lack of sleep that I would be biting my veins and
+howling--as mad a hatter as any of our cargo of mad hatters.  And so
+we come to it--the everlasting mystery of woman.  One may not be able
+to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one
+cannot get along without her.  But, regarding Miss West, I do
+entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she is not a suffragette.
+That would be too much.
+
+Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human.  He was really a
+bit fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he
+regretted the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms.  It
+seems he has a keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on
+the Elsinore, and that, although he is oblivious of the existence of
+the crew, he is not oblivious of my comfort.  By his few expressions
+of regret it appears that he cannot forgive himself for his careless
+acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my affliction.  Yes; Captain
+West is a real human man.  Is he not the father of the slender-faced,
+strapping-bodied Miss West?
+
+"Thank goodness that's settled," was Miss West's exclamation this
+morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how
+gloriously I had slept.
+
+And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all
+practical purposes--it was settled, she next said:
+
+"Come on and see the chickens."
+
+And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the
+'midship-house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat
+hens in the ship's chicken-coop.
+
+As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait
+of hers as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming
+down on the tug from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor
+require to be entertained.
+
+COME AND SEE THE CHICKENS!--Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of
+that simple invitation!  For effrontery of possessiveness is there
+anything that can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female,
+human woman?--COME AND SEE THE CHICKENS!  Oh, well, the sailors
+for'ard may be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here,
+aft, is one male passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an
+equally hard-bitten adventurer on the sea of matrimony.  When I go
+over the census I remember at least several women, superior to Miss
+West, who trilled their song of sex and failed to shipwreck me.
+
+As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of
+the sea has stolen into my mental processes.  Involuntarily I think
+in terms of the sea.  Another thing I notice is my excessive use of
+superlatives.  But then, everything on board the Elsinore is
+superlative.  I find myself continually combing my vocabulary in
+quest of just and adequate words.  Yet am I aware of failure.  For
+example, all the words of all the dictionaries would fail to
+approximate the exceeding terribleness of Mulligan Jacobs.
+
+But to return to the chickens.  Despite every precaution, it was
+evident that they had had a hard time during the past days of storm.
+It was equally evident that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness,
+had not neglected them.  Under her directions the steward had
+actually installed a small oil-stove in the big coop, and she now
+beckoned him up to the top of the house as he was passing for'ard to
+the galley.  It was for the purpose of instructing him further in the
+matter of feeding them.
+
+Where were the grits?  They needed grits.  He didn't know.  The sack
+had been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had
+promised a couple of sailors that afternoon to overhaul the
+lazarette.
+
+"Plenty of ashes," she told the steward.  "Remember.  And if a sailor
+doesn't clean the coop each day, you report to me.  And give them
+only clean food--no spoiled scraps, mind.  How many eggs yesterday?"
+
+The steward's eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got
+nine the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.
+
+"The poor things," said Miss West--to me.  "You've no idea how bad
+weather reduces their laying."  She turned back upon the steward.
+"Mind now, you watch and find out which hens don't lay, and kill them
+first.  And you ask me each time before you kill one."
+
+I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while
+Miss West talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler.  But it gave
+me opportunity to observe her.  It is the length of her eyes that
+accentuates their steadiness of gaze--helped, of course, by the dark
+brows and lashes.  I noted again the warm gray of her eyes.  And I
+began to identify her, to locate her.  She is a physical type of the
+best of the womanhood of old New England.  Nothing spare nor meagre,
+nor bred out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one would
+call robust.  When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred.  I must
+fall back on my other word, which will have to be the last:  Miss
+West is vital-bodied.  That is the key-word.
+
+When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I
+ventured my customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:
+
+"And has O'Sullivan bought Andy Fay's sea-boots yet?"
+
+"Not yet, Mr. Pathurst," was the reply, "though he nearly got them
+early this morning.  Come on along, sir, and I'll show you."
+
+Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along
+the bridge, across the 'midship-house and the for'ard-house.  From
+the edge of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two
+Japanese, with sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed
+bundle that unmistakably contained a human body.
+
+"O'Sullivan used a razor," said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"And that is Andy Fay?" I cried.
+
+"No, sir, not Andy.  That's a Dutchman.  Christian Jespersen was his
+name on the articles.  He got in O'Sullivan's way when O'Sullivan
+went after the boots.  That's what saved Andy.  Andy was more active.
+Jespersen couldn't get out of his own way, much less out of
+O'Sullivan's.  There's Andy sitting over there."
+
+I followed Mr. Mellaire's gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
+Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe.  One arm was
+in a sling and his head was bandaged.  Beside him squatted Mulligan
+Jacobs.  They were a pair.  Both were blue-eyed, and both were
+malevolent-eyed.  And they were equally emaciated.  It was easy to
+see that they had discovered early in the voyage their kinship of
+bitterness.  Andy Fay, I knew, was sixty-three years old, although he
+looked a hundred; and Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty, made
+up for the difference by the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in
+his face and eyes.  I wondered if he sat beside the injured bitter
+one in some sense of sympathy, or if he were there in order to gloat.
+
+Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
+inevitable clown-grin.  One hand was swathed in bandages.
+
+"Must have kept Mr. Pike busy," was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till eight."
+
+"What?" I asked.  "Are there any more?"
+
+"One more, sir, a sheeny.  I didn't know his name before, but Mr.
+Pike got it--Isaac B. Chantz.  I never saw in all my life at sea as
+many sheenies as are on board the Elsinore right now.  Sheenies don't
+take to the sea as a rule.  We've certainly got more than our share
+of them.  Chantz isn't badly hurt, but you ought to hear him
+whimper."
+
+"Where's O'Sullivan?" I inquired.
+
+"In the 'midship-house with Davis, and without a mark.  Mr. Pike got
+into the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw.  And now
+he's lashed down and talking in a trance.  He's thrown the fear of
+God into Davis.  Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike,
+threatening to brain O'Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and
+complaining that it's no way to run a hospital.  He'd have padded
+cells, straitjackets, night and day nurses, and violent wards, I
+suppose--and a convalescents' home in a Queen Anne cottage on the
+poop.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," Mr. Mellaire sighed.  "This is the funniest
+voyage and the funniest crew I've ever tackled.  It's not going to
+come to a good end.  Anybody can see that with half an eye.  It'll be
+dead of winter off the Horn, and a fo'c's'le full of lunatics and
+cripples to do the work.--Just take a look at that one.  Crazy as a
+bedbug.  He's likely to go overboard any time.''
+
+I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung
+overboard the first day.  He had just come around the corner of the
+house, and, beyond one arm in a sling, seemed in good condition.  He
+walked easily and with strength, a testimonial to the virtues of Mr.
+Pike's rough surgery.
+
+My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian
+Jespersen, and to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor's
+shroud.  One of them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton
+and bandage.
+
+"Did he get hurt, too?" I asked.
+
+"No, sir.  He's the sail-maker.  They're both sail-makers.  He's a
+good one, too.  Yatsuda is his name.  But he's just had blood-
+poisoning and lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months.  He
+flatly refused to let them amputate.  He's all right now, but the
+hand is dead, all except the thumb and fore-finger, and he's teaching
+himself to sew with his left hand.  He's as clever a sail-maker as
+you'll find at sea."
+
+"A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination," I remarked.
+
+"It's put five men out of commission," Mr. Mellaire sighed.  "There's
+O'Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone, and Andy Fay, and
+Shorty, and the sheeny.  And the voyage not started yet.  And there's
+Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps--why, sir,
+we'll soon be that weak it'll take both watches to set a staysail."
+
+Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr.
+Mellaire, I was shocked--no; not because death was aboard with us.  I
+have stood by my philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or
+by murder.  What affected me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the
+affair.  Even murder--murder for cause--I can understand.  It is
+comprehensible that men should kill one another in the passion of
+love, of hatred, of patriotism, of religion.  But this was different.
+Here was killing without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing
+monstrously irrational.
+
+Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the
+open door of the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O'Sullivan,
+and peeped in.  There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower
+bunk, rolling his eyes and raving.  In the top bunk, directly above,
+lay Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe.  I looked for the marlin-
+spike.  There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him.
+
+"It's hell, ain't it, sir?" was his greeting.  "And how am I goin' to
+get any sleep with that baboon chattering away there.  He never lets
+up--keeps his chin-music goin' right along when he's asleep, only
+worse.  The way he grits his teeth is something awful.  Now I leave
+it to you, sir, is it right to put a crazy like that in with a sick
+man?  And I am a sick man.''
+
+While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and
+halted just out of sight of the man in the bunk.  And the man talked
+on.
+
+"By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk.  It hurts me to crawl up
+here.  It's inhumanity, that's what it is, and sailors at sea are
+better protected by the law than they used to be.  And I'll have you
+for a witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle."
+
+Mr. Pike stepped into the doorway.
+
+"Shut up, you damned sea-lawyer, you," he snarled.  "Haven't you
+played a dirty trick enough comin' on board this ship in your
+condition?  And if I have anything more out of you . . . "
+
+Mr. Pike was so angry that he could not complete the threat.  After
+spluttering for a moment he made a fresh attempt.
+
+"You . . . you . . . well, you annoy me, that's what you do."
+
+"I know the law, sir," Davis answered promptly.  "I worked full able
+seaman on this here ship.  All hands can testify to that.  I was
+aloft from the start.  Yes, sir, and up to my neck in salt water day
+and night.  And you had me below trimmin' coal.  I did full duty and
+more, until this sickness got me--"
+
+"You were petrified and rotten before you ever saw this ship," Mr.
+Pike broke in.
+
+"The court'll decide that, sir," replied the imperturbable Davis.
+
+"And if you go to shoutin' off your sea-lawyer mouth," Mr. Pike
+continued, "I'll jerk you out of that and show you what real work
+is."
+
+"An' lay the owners open for lovely damages when we get in," Davis
+sneered.
+
+"Not if I bury you before we get in," was the mate's quick, grim
+retort.  "And let me tell you, Davis, you ain't the first sea-lawyer
+I've dropped over the side with a sack of coal to his feet."
+
+Mr. Pike turned, with a final "Damned sea-lawyer!" and started along
+the deck.  I was walking behind him when he stopped abruptly.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst."
+
+Not as an officer to a passenger did he thus address me.  His tone
+was imperative, and I gave heed.
+
+"Mr. Pathurst.  From now on the less you see aboard this ship the
+better.  That is all."
+
+And again he turned on his heel and went his way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+No, the sea is not a gentle place.  It must be the very hardness of
+the life that makes all sea-people hard.  Of course, Captain West is
+unaware that his crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never
+address the men save to give commands.  But Miss West, who is more
+like myself, a passenger, ignores the men.  She does not even say
+good-morning to the man at the wheel when she first comes on deck.
+Nevertheless I shall, at least to the man at the wheel.  Am I not a
+passenger?
+
+Which reminds me.  Technically I am not a passenger.  The Elsinore
+has no licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as
+third mate and am supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month.
+Wada is down as cabin boy, although I paid a good price for his
+passage and he is my servant.
+
+Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead.  Within an
+hour after I had watched the sail-makers at work Christian Jespersen
+was slid overboard, feet first, a sack of coal to his feet to sink
+him.  It was a mild, calm day, and the Elsinore, logging a lazy two
+knots, was not hove to for the occasion.  At the last moment Captain
+West came for'ard, prayer-book in hand, read the brief service for
+burial at sea, and returned immediately aft.  It was the first time I
+had seen him for'ard.
+
+I shall not bother to describe the burial.  All I shall say of it is
+that it was as sordid as Christian Jespersen's life had been and as
+his death had been.
+
+As for Miss West, she sat in a deck-chair on the poop busily engaged
+with some sort of fancy work.  When Christian Jespersen and his coal
+splashed into the sea the crew immediately dispersed, the watch below
+going to its bunks, the watch on deck to its work.  Not a minute
+elapsed ere Mr. Mellaire was giving orders and the men were pulling
+and hauling.  So I returned to the poop to be unpleasantly impressed
+by Miss West's smiling unconcern.
+
+"Well, he's buried," I observed.
+
+"Oh," she said, with all the tonelessness of disinterest, and went on
+with her stitching.
+
+She must have sensed my frame of mind, for, after a moment, she
+paused from her sewing and looked at me
+
+Your first sea funeral, Mr. Pathurst?
+
+"Death at sea does not seem to affect you," I said bluntly.
+
+"Not any more than on the land."  She shrugged her shoulders.  "So
+many people die, you know.  And when they are strangers to you . . .
+well, what do you do on the land when you learn that some workers
+have been killed in a factory you pass every day coming to town?  It
+is the same on the sea."
+
+"It's too bad we are a hand short," I said deliberately.
+
+It did not miss her.  Just as deliberately she replied:
+
+"Yes, isn't it?  And so early in the voyage, too."  She looked at me,
+and when I could not forbear a smile of appreciation she smiled back.
+
+"Oh, I know very well, Mr. Pathurst, that you think me a heartless
+wretch.  But it isn't that it's . . . it's the sea, I suppose.  And
+yet, I didn't know this man.  I don't remember ever having seen him.
+At this stage of the voyage I doubt if I could pick out half-a-dozen
+of the sailors as men I had ever laid eyes on.  So why vex myself
+with even thinking of this stupid stranger who was killed by another
+stupid stranger?  As well might one die of grief with reading the
+murder columns of the daily papers."
+
+"And yet, it seems somehow different," I contended.
+
+"Oh, you'll get used to it," she assured me cheerfully, and returned
+to her sewing.
+
+I asked her if she had read Moody's Ship of Souls, but she had not.
+I searched her out further.  She liked Browning, and was especially
+fond of The Ring and the Book.  This was the key to her.  She cared
+only for healthful literature--for the literature that exposits the
+vital lies of life.
+
+For instance, the mention of Schopenhauer produced smiles and
+laughter.  To her all the philosophers of pessimism were laughable.
+The red blood of her would not permit her to take them seriously.  I
+tried her out with a conversation I had had with De Casseres shortly
+before leaving New York.  De Casseres, after tracing Jules de
+Gaultier's philosophic genealogy back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
+had concluded with the proposition that out of their two formulas de
+Gaultier had constructed an even profounder formula.  The "Will-to-
+Live" of the one and the "Will-to-Power" of the other were, after
+all, only parts of de Gaultier's supreme generalization, the "Will-
+to-Illusion."
+
+I flatter myself that even De Casseres would have been pleased with
+the way I repeated his argument.  And when I had concluded it, Miss
+West promptly demanded if the realists might not be fooled by their
+own phrases as often and as completely as were the poor common
+mortals with the vital lies they never questioned.
+
+And there we were.  An ordinary young woman, who had never vexed her
+brains with ultimate problems, hears such things stated for the first
+time, and immediately, and with a laugh, sweeps them all away.  I
+doubt not that De Casseres would have agreed with her.
+
+"Do you believe in God?" I asked rather abruptly.  She dropped her
+sewing into her lap, looked at me meditatively, then gazed on and
+away across the flashing sea and up into the azure dome of sky.  And
+finally, with true feminine evasion, she replied:
+
+"My father does."
+
+"But you?" I insisted.
+
+"I really don't know.  I don't bother my head about such things.  I
+used to when I was a little girl.  And yet . . . yes, surely I
+believe in God.  At times, when I am not thinking about it at all, I
+am very sure, and my faith that all is well is just as strong as the
+faith of your Jewish friend in the phrases of the philosophers.
+That's all it comes to, I suppose, in every case--faith.  But, as I
+say, why bother?"
+
+"Ah, I have you now, Miss West!" I cried.  "You are a true daughter
+of Herodias."
+
+"It doesn't sound nice," she said with a moue.
+
+"And it isn't," I exulted.  "Nevertheless, it is what you are.  It is
+Arthur Symon's poem, The Daughters of Herodias.  Some day I shall
+read it to you, and you will answer.  I know you will answer that
+you, too, have looked often upon the stars."
+
+We had just got upon the subject of music, of which she possesses a
+surprisingly solid knowledge, and she was telling me that Debussy and
+his school held no particular charm for her, when Possum set up a
+wild yelping.
+
+The puppy had strayed for'ard along the bridge to the 'midship-house,
+and had evidently been investigating the chickens when his disaster
+came upon him.  So shrill was his terror that we both stood up.  He
+was dashing along the bridge toward us at full speed, yelping at
+every jump and continually turning his head back in the direction
+whence he came.
+
+I spoke to him and held out my hand, and was rewarded with a snap and
+clash of teeth as he scuttled past.  Still with head turned back, he
+went on along the poop.  Before I could apprehend his danger, Mr.
+Pike and Miss West were after him.  The mate was the nearer, and with
+a magnificent leap gained the rail just in time to intercept Possum,
+who was blindly going overboard under the slender railing.  With a
+sort of scooping kick Mr. Pike sent the animal rolling half across
+the poop.  Howling and snapping more violently, Possum regained his
+feet and staggered on toward the opposite railing.
+
+"Don't touch him!" Mr. Pike cried, as Miss West showed her intention
+of catching the crazed little animal with her hands.  "Don't touch'm!
+He's got a fit."
+
+But it did not deter her.  He was half-way under the railing when she
+caught him up and held him at arm's length while he howled and barked
+and slavered.
+
+"It's a fit," said Mr. Pike, as the terrier collapsed and lay on the
+deck jerking convulsively.
+
+"Perhaps a chicken pecked him," said Miss West.  "At any rate, get a
+bucket of water."
+
+"Better let me take him," I volunteered helplessly, for I was
+unfamiliar with fits.
+
+"No; it's all right," she answered.  "I'll take charge of him.  The
+cold water is what he needs.  He got too close to the coop, and a
+peck on the nose frightened him into the fit."
+
+"First time I ever heard of a fit coming that way," Mr. Pike
+remarked, as he poured water over the puppy under Miss West's
+direction.  "It's just a plain puppy fit.  They all get them at sea."
+
+"I think it was the sails that caused it," I argued.  "I've noticed
+that he is very afraid of them.  When they flap, he crouches down in
+terror and starts to run.  You noticed how he ran with his head
+turned back?"
+
+"I've seen dogs with fits do that when there was nothing to frighten
+them," Mr. Pike contended.
+
+"It was a fit, no matter what caused it," Miss West stated
+conclusively.  "Which means that he has not been fed properly.  From
+now on I shall feed him.  You tell your boy that, Mr. Pathurst.
+Nobody is to feed Possum anything without my permission."
+
+At this juncture Wada arrived with Possum's little sleeping box, and
+they prepared to take him below.
+
+"It was splendid of you, Miss West," I said, "and rash, as well, and
+I won't attempt to thank you.  But I tell you what-you take him.
+He's your dog now."
+
+She laughed and shook her head as I opened the chart-house door for
+her to pass.
+
+"No; but I'll take care of him for you.  Now don't bother to come
+below.  This is my affair, and you would only be in the way.  Wada
+will help me."
+
+And I was rather surprised, as I returned to my deck chair and sat
+down, to find how affected I was by the little episode.  I
+remembered, at the first, that my pulse had been distinctly
+accelerated with the excitement of what had taken place.  And
+somehow, as I leaned back in my chair and lighted a cigarette, the
+strangeness of the whole voyage vividly came to me.  Miss West and I
+talk philosophy and art on the poop of a stately ship in a circle of
+flashing sea, while Captain West dreams of his far home, and Mr. Pike
+and Mr. Mellaire stand watch and watch and snarl orders, and the
+slaves of men pull and haul, and Possum has fits, and Andy Fay and
+Mulligan Jacobs burn with hatred unconsumable, and the small-handed
+half-caste Chinese cooks for all, and Sundry Buyers perpetually
+presses his abdomen, and O'Sullivan raves in the steel cell of the
+'midship-house, and Charles Davis lies about him nursing a marlin-
+spike, and Christian Jespersen, miles astern, is deep sunk in the sea
+with a sack of coal at his feet.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+Two weeks out to-day, on a balmy sea, under a cloud-flecked sky, and
+slipping an easy eight knots through the water to a light easterly
+wind.  Captain West said he was almost convinced that it was the
+north-east trade.  Also, I have learned that the Elsinore, in order
+to avoid being jammed down on Cape San Roque, on the Brazil coast,
+must first fight eastward almost to the coast of Africa.  On
+occasion, on this traverse, the Cape Verde Islands are raised.  No
+wonder the voyage from Baltimore to Seattle is reckoned at eighteen
+thousand miles.
+
+I found Tony, the suicidal Greek, steering this morning when I came
+on deck.  He seemed sensible enough, and quite rationally took off
+his hat when I said good morning to him.  The sick men are improving
+nicely, with the exceptions of Charles Davis and O'Sullivan.  The
+latter still is lashed to his bunk, and Mr. Pike has compelled Davis
+to attend on him.  As a result, Davis moves about the deck, bringing
+food and water from the galley and grumbling his wrongs to every
+member of the crew.
+
+Wada told me a strange thing this morning.  It seems that he, the
+steward, and the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the
+cook's room--all being Asiatics--where they talk over ship's gossip.
+They seem to miss little, and Wada brings it all to me.  The thing
+Wada told me was the curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire.  They have sat
+in judgment on him and they do not approve of his intimacy with the
+three gangsters for'ard.
+
+"But, Wada," I said, "he is not that kind of a man.  He is very hard
+and rough with all the sailors.  He treats them like dogs.  You know
+that."
+
+"Sure," assented Wada.  "Other sailors he do that.  But those three
+very bad men he make good friends.  Louis say second mate belong aft
+like first mate and captain.  No good for second mate talk like
+friend with sailors.  No good for ship.  Bime by trouble.  You see.
+Louis say Mr. Mellaire crazy do that kind funny business."
+
+All of which, if it were true, and I saw no reason to doubt it, led
+me to inquire.  It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy,
+and Bert Rhine, have made themselves cocks of the forecastle.
+Standing together, they have established a reign of terror and are
+ruling the forecastle.  All their training in New York in ruling the
+slum brutes and weaklings in their gangs fits them for the part.  As
+near as I could make out from Wada's tale, they first began on the
+two Italians in their watch, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani.  By
+means I cannot guess, they have reduced these two wretches to
+trembling slaves.  As an instance, the other night, according to the
+ship's gossip, Bert Rhine made Bombini get out of bed and fetch him a
+drink of water.
+
+Isaac Chantz is likewise under their rule, though he is treated more
+kindly.  Herman Lunkenheimer, a good-natured but simple-minded dolt
+of a German, received a severe beating from the three because he
+refused to wash some of Nosey Murphy's dirty garments.  The two
+bosuns are in fear of their lives with this clique, which is growing;
+for Steve Roberts, the ex-cowboy, and the white-slaver, Arthur
+Deacon, have been admitted to it.
+
+I am the only one aft who possesses this information, and I confess I
+don't know what to do with it.  I know that Mr. Pike would tell me to
+mind my own business.  Mr. Mellaire is out of the question.  And
+Captain West hasn't any crew.  And I fear Miss West would laugh at me
+for my pains.  Besides, I understand that every forecastle has its
+bully, or group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and
+no concern of the afterguard.  The ship's work goes on.  The only
+effect I can conjecture is an increase in the woes of the
+unfortunates who must bow to this petty tyranny for'ard.
+
+- Oh, and another thing Wada told me.  The gangster clique has
+established its privilege of taking first cut of the salt-beef in the
+meat-kids.  After that, the rest take the rejected pieces.  But I
+will say, contrary to my expectations, the Elsinore's forecastle is
+well found.  The men are not on whack.  They have all they want to
+eat.  A barrel of good hardtack stands always open in the forecastle.
+Louis bakes fresh bread for the sailors three times a week.  The
+variety of food is excellent, if not the quality.  There is no
+restriction in the amount of water for drinking purposes.  And I can
+only say that in this good weather the men's appearance improves
+daily.
+
+Possum is very sick.  Each day he grows thinner.  Scarcely can I call
+him a perambulating skeleton, because he is too weak to walk.  Each
+day, in this delightful weather, Wada, under Miss West's
+instructions, brings him up in his box and places him out of the wind
+on the awninged poop.  She has taken full charge of the puppy, and
+has him sleep in her room each night.  I found her yesterday, in the
+chart-room, reading up the Elsinore's medical library.  Later on she
+overhauled the medicine-chest.  She is essentially the life-giving,
+life-conserving female of the species.  All her ways, for herself and
+for others, make toward life.
+
+And yet--and this is so curious it gives me pause--she shows no
+interest in the sick and injured for'ard.
+
+They are to her cattle, or less than cattle.  As the life-giver and
+race-conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping
+regularly into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the
+midship-house and dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts.  On
+the contrary, as with her father, these wretched humans do not exist.
+
+And still again, when the steward jammed a splinter under his nail,
+she was greatly concerned, and manipulated the tweezers and pulled it
+out.  The Elsinore reminds me of a slave plantation before the war;
+and Miss West is the lady of the plantation, interested only in the
+house-slaves.  The field slaves are beyond her ken or consideration,
+and the sailors are the Elsinore's field slaves.  Why, several days
+back, when Wada suffered from a severe headache, she was quite
+perturbed, and dosed him with aspirin.  Well, I suppose this is all
+due to her sea-training.  She has been trained hard.
+
+We have the phonograph in the second dog-watch every other evening in
+this fine weather.  On the alternate evenings this period is Mr.
+Pike's watch on deck.  But when it is his evening below, even at
+dinner, he betrays his anticipation by an eagerness ill suppressed.
+And yet, on each such occasion, he punctiliously waits until we ask
+if we are to be favoured with music.  Then his hard-bitten face
+lights up, although the lines remain hard as ever, hiding his
+ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly, off-handedly, that he guesses he can
+play over a few records.  And so, every other evening, we watch this
+killer and driver, with lacerated knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing
+and caressing his beloved discs, ravished with the music of them,
+and, as he told me early in the voyage, at such moments believing in
+God.
+
+A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore.  I confess, while
+it seems that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with
+every detail of the little round of living, that I cannot orient
+myself.  My mind continually strays from things non-understandable to
+things incomprehensible--from our Samurai captain with the exquisite
+Gabriel voice that is heard only in the tumult and thunder of storm;
+on to the ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with the bright, liquid,
+pain-filled eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the forecastle and
+seduce the second mate; to the perpetually muttering O'Sullivan in
+the steel-walled hole and the complaining Davis nursing the marlin-
+spike in the upper bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift
+in this vastitude of ocean with a coal-sack at his feet.  At such
+moments all the life on the Elsinore becomes as unreal as life to the
+philosopher is unreal.
+
+I am a philosopher.  Therefore, it is unreal to me.  But is it unreal
+to Messrs.  Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the
+rest of the stupid herd for'ard?  I cannot help remembering a remark
+of De Casseres.  It was over the wine in Mouquin's.  Said he:  "The
+profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is,
+against the Real.  He shuns facts from his infancy.  His life is a
+perpetual evasion.  Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive.
+He lives on fiction and myth.  It is the Lie that makes him free.
+Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis;
+men dare not.  The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the
+Real because he has no imagination.  Man, awake, is compelled to seek
+a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism,
+Immortality, Alcohol, Love.  From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to
+Maya-Lie."
+
+Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly.  And so, the thought
+comes to me, that to all these slaves of the Elsinore the Real is
+real because they fictionally escape it.  One and all they are
+obsessed with the belief that they are free agents.  To me the Real
+is unreal, because I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth.
+My pristine fictional escape from the Real, making me a philosopher,
+has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real.  I, the super-
+realist, am the only unrealist on board the Elsinore.  Therefore I,
+who penetrate it deepest, in the whole phenomena of living on the
+Elsinore see it only as phantasmagoria.
+
+Paradoxes?  I admit it.  All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
+contradictions.  But all the others on the Elsinore, sheer surface
+swimmers, keep afloat on this sea--forsooth, because they have never
+dreamed its depth.  And I can easily imagine what Miss West's
+practical, hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of
+mine.  After all, words are traps.  I don't know what I know, nor
+what I think I think.
+
+This I do know:  I cannot orient myself.  I am the maddest and most
+sea-lost soul on board.  Take Miss West.  I am beginning to admire
+her.  Why, I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably
+healthy.  And yet, it is this very health of her, the absence of any
+shred of degenerative genius, that prevents her from being great . .
+. for instance, in her music.
+
+A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to
+her playing.  The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been
+of the best.  To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of
+Bryn Mawr, and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long
+ago.  And yet she lacks in her music.
+
+Her touch is masterful.  She has the firmness and weight (without
+sharpness or pounding) of a man's playing--the strength and surety
+that most women lack and that some women know they lack.  When she
+makes a slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the
+difficulty is overcome.  And she is quick to overcome it.
+
+Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no
+sentiment, no fire.  When she plays Chopin, she interprets his
+sureness and neatness.  She is the master of Chopin's technique, but
+she never walks where Chopin walks on the heights.  Somehow, she
+stops short of the fulness of music.
+
+I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my
+suggestion, to go over and over the Three Rhapsodies.  On the Third
+Intermezzo she was at her best, and a good best it was.
+
+"You were talking of Debussy," she remarked.  "I've got some of his
+stuff here.  But I don't get into it.  I don't understand it, and
+there is no use in trying.  It doesn't seem altogether like real
+music to me.  It fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold
+of it."
+
+"Yet you like MacDowell," I challenged.
+
+"Y. . . es," she admitted grudgingly.  "His New England Idylls and
+Fireside Tales.  And I like that Finnish man's stuff, Sibelius, too,
+although it seems to me too soft, too richly soft, too beautiful, if
+you know what I mean.  It seems to cloy."
+
+What a pity, I thought, that with that noble masculine touch of hers
+she is unaware of the deeps of music.  Some day I shall try to get
+from her just what Beethoven, say, and Chopin, mean to her.  She has
+not read Shaw's Perfect Wagnerite, nor had she ever heard of
+Nietzsche's Case of Wagner.  She likes Mozart, and old Boccherini,
+and Leonardo Leo.  Likewise she is partial to Schumann, especially
+Forest Scenes.  And she played his Papillons most brilliantly.  When
+I closed my eyes I could have sworn it was a man's fingers on the
+keys.
+
+And yet, I must say it, in the long run her playing makes me nervous.
+I am continually led up to false expectations.  Always, she seems
+just on the verge of achieving the big thing, the super-big thing,
+and always she just misses it by a shade.  Just as I am prepared for
+the culminating flash and illumination, I receive more perfection of
+technique.  She is cold.  She must be cold . . . Or else, and the
+theory is worth considering, she is too healthy.
+
+I shall certainly read to her The Daughters of Herodias.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+
+Was there ever such a voyage!  This morning, when I came on deck, I
+found nobody at the wheel.  It was a startling sight--the great
+Elsinore, by the wind, under an Alpine range of canvas, every sail
+set from skysails to try-sails and spanker, slipping across the
+surface of a mild trade-wind sea, and no hand at the wheel to guide
+her.
+
+No one was on the poop.  It was Mr. Pike's watch, and I strolled
+for'ard along the bridge to find him.  He was on Number One hatch
+giving some instructions to the sail-makers.  I awaited my chance,
+until he glanced up and greeted me.
+
+"Good morning," I answered.  "And what man is at the wheel now?"
+
+"That crazy Greek, Tony," he replied.
+
+"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco he isn't," I offered.
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me with quick sharpness.
+
+"Who is at the wheel?"
+
+"Nobody," I replied.
+
+And then he exploded into action.  The age-lag left his massive
+frame, and he bounded aft along the deck at a speed no man on board
+could have exceeded; and I doubt if very many could have equalled it.
+He went up the poop-ladder three steps at a time and disappeared in
+the direction of the wheel behind the chart-house.
+
+Next came a promptitude of bellowed orders, and all the watch was
+slacking away after braces to starboard and pulling on after braces
+to port.  I had already learned the manoeuvre.  Mr. Pike was wearing
+ship.
+
+As I returned aft along the bridge Mr. Mellaire and the carpenter
+emerged from the cabin door.  They had been interrupted at breakfast,
+for they were wiping their mouths.  Mr. Pike came to the break of the
+poop, called down instructions to the second mate, who proceeded
+for'ard, and ordered the carpenter to take the wheel.
+
+As the Elsinore swung around on her heel Mr. Pike put her on the back
+track so as to cover the water she had just crossed over.  He lowered
+the glasses through which he was scanning the sea and pointed down
+the hatchway that opened into the big after-room beneath.  The ladder
+was gone.
+
+"Must have taken the lazarette ladder with him," said Mr. Pike.
+
+Captain West strolled out of the chart-room.  He said good morning in
+his customary way, courteously to me and formally to the mate, and
+strolled on along the poop to the wheel, where he paused to glance
+into the binnacle.  Turning, he went on leisurely to the break of the
+poop.  Again he came back to us.  Fully two minutes must have elapsed
+ere he spoke.
+
+"What is the matter, Mr. Pike?  Man overboard?"
+
+"Yes, sir," was the answer.
+
+"And took the lazarette ladder along with him?" Captain West queried.
+
+"Yes, sir.  It's the Greek that jumped over at Baltimore."
+
+Evidently the affair was not serious enough for Captain West to be
+the Samurai.  He lighted a cigar and resumed his stroll.  And yet he
+had missed nothing, not even the absence of the ladder.
+
+Mr. Pike sent look-outs aloft to every skysail-yard, and the Elsinore
+slipped along through the smooth sea.  Miss West came up and stood
+beside me, searching the ocean with her eyes while I told her the
+little I knew.  She evidenced no excitement, and reassured me by
+telling me how difficult it was to lose a man of Tony's suicidal
+type.
+
+"Their madness always seems to come upon them in fine weather or
+under safe circumstances," she smiled, "when a boat can be lowered or
+a tug is alongside.  And sometimes they take life--preservers with
+them, as in this case."
+
+At the end of an hour Mr. Pike wore the Elsinore around, and again
+retraced the course she must have been sailing when the Greek went
+over.  Captain West still strolled and smoked, and Miss West made a
+brief trip below to give Wada forgotten instructions about Possum.
+Andy Pay was called to the wheel, and the carpenter went below to
+finish his breakfast.
+
+It all seemed rather callous to me.  Nobody was much concerned for
+the man who was overboard somewhere on that lonely ocean.  And yet I
+had to admit that everything possible was being done to find him.  I
+talked a little with Mr. Pike, and he seemed more vexed than anything
+else.  He disliked to have the ship's work interrupted in such
+fashion.
+
+Mr. Mellaire's attitude was different.
+
+"We are short-handed enough as it is," he told me, when he joined us
+on the poop.  "We can't afford to lose him even if he is crazy.  We
+need him.  He's a good sailor most of the time."
+
+The hail came from the mizzen-skysail-yard.  The Maltese Cockney it
+was who first sighted the man and called down the information.  The
+mate, looking to windwards, suddenly lowered his glasses, rubbed his
+eyes in a puzzled way, and looked again.  Then Miss West, using
+another pair of glasses, cried out in surprise and began to laugh.
+
+"What do you make of it, Miss West?" the mate asked.
+
+"He doesn't seem to be in the water.  He's standing up."
+
+Mr. Pike nodded.
+
+"He's on the ladder," he said.  "I'd forgotten that.  It fooled me at
+first.  I couldn't understand it."  He turned to the second mate.
+"Mr. Mellaire, will you launch the long boat and get some kind of a
+crew into it while I back the main-yard?  I'll go in the boat.  Pick
+men that can pull an oar."
+
+"You go, too," Miss West said to me.  "It will be an opportunity to
+get outside the Elsinore and see her under full sail."
+
+Mr. Pike nodded consent, so I went along, sitting near him in the
+stern-sheets where he steered, while half a dozen hands rowed us
+toward the suicide, who stood so weirdly upon the surface of the sea.
+The Maltese Cockney pulled the stroke oar, and among the other five
+men was one whose name I had but recently learned--Ditman Olansen, a
+Norwegian.  A good seaman, Mr. Mellaire had told me, in whose watch
+he was; a good seaman, but "crank-eyed."  When pressed for an
+explanation Mr. Mellaire had said that he was the sort of man who
+flew into blind rages, and that one never could tell what little
+thing would produce such a rage.  As near as I could grasp it, Ditman
+Olansen was a Berserker type.  Yet, as I watched him pulling in good
+time at the oar, his large, pale-blue eyes seemed almost bovine--the
+last man in the world, in my judgment, to have a Berserker fit.
+
+As we drew close to the Greek he began to scream menacingly at us and
+to brandish a sheath-knife.  His weight sank the ladder until the
+water washed his knees, and on this submerged support he balanced
+himself with wild writhing and outflinging of arms.  His face,
+grimacing like a monkey's, was not a pretty thing to look upon.  And
+as he continued to threaten us with the knife I wondered how the
+problem of rescuing him would be solved.
+
+But I should have trusted Mr. Pike for that.  He removed the boat-
+stretcher from under the Maltese Cockney's feet and laid it close to
+hand in the stern-sheets.  Then he had the men reverse the boat and
+back it upon the Greek.  Dodging a sweep of the knife, Mr. Pike
+awaited his chance, until a passing wave lifted the boat's stern
+high, while Tony was sinking toward the trough.  This was the moment.
+Again I was favoured with a sample of the lightning speed with which
+that aged man of sixty-nine could handle his body.  Timed precisely,
+and delivered in a flash and with weight, the boat-stretcher came
+down on the Greek's head.  The knife fell into the sea, and the
+demented creature collapsed and followed it, knocked unconscious.
+Mr. Pike scooped him out, quite effortlessly it seemed to me, and
+flung him into the boat's bottom at my feet.
+
+The next moment the men were bending to their oars and the mate was
+steering back to the Elsinore.  It was a stout rap Mr. Pike had
+administered with the boat-stretcher.  Thin streaks of blood oozed on
+the damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp.  I could but stare at
+the lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet.  A
+man, all life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced
+the next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of
+death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of
+the philosopher.  And in this case it had been accomplished so
+simply, by means of a stick of wood brought sharply in contact with
+his skull.
+
+If Tony the Greek be accounted an APPEARANCE, what was he now?--a
+DISAPPEARANCE?  And if so, whither had he disappeared?  And whence
+would he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call
+consciousness returned to him?  The first word, much less the last,
+of the phenomena of personality and consciousness yet remains to be
+uttered by the psychologists.
+
+Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle
+of the Elsinore burst upon me.  I had been so long on board, and in
+board of her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship.  So
+low to the water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the
+tall, sky-reaching spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of
+canvas seemed preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of
+the law of gravitation.  It required effort to realize that that slim
+curve of hull inclosed and bore up from the sea's bottom five
+thousand tons of coal.  And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites
+of men had conceived and constructed so stately and magnificent an
+element-defying fabric--mites of men, most woefully like the Greek at
+my feet, prone to precipitation into the blackness by means of a rap
+on the head with a piece of wood.
+
+Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned.
+From somewhere he was reappearing.  I noticed Mr. Pike look at him
+quickly, as if apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would
+require more boat-stretcher.  But Tony merely fluttered his big black
+eyes open and stared at me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere
+he closed them again.
+
+"What are you going to do with him?" I asked the mate.
+
+"Put 'm back to work," was the reply.  "It's all he's good for, and
+he ain't hurt.  Somebody's got to work this ship around the Horn."
+
+When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below.
+In the chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers.  Mr.
+Mellaire had turned in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch
+on deck at noon.  Mr. Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to
+state, does not sleep aft.  He shares a room in the 'midship-house
+with Mr. Pike's Nancy.
+
+Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek.  He was bundled out
+upon Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended,
+to recover consciousness as he might elect.  Yes, and so inured have
+I become that I make free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself.
+My eyes were still filled with the beauty of the Elsinore.  One does
+grow hard at sea.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+
+One does not mind the trades.  We have held the north-east trade for
+days now, and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls
+and tinkles on the taffrail.  Yesterday, log and observation
+approximated a run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before
+we ran two hundred and forty, and the day before that two hundred and
+sixty-one.  But one does not appreciate the force of the wind.  So
+balmy and exhilarating is it that it is so much atmospheric wine.  I
+delight to open my lungs and my pores to it.  Nor does it chill.  At
+any hour of the night, while the cabin lies asleep, I break off from
+my reading and go up on the poop in the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.
+
+I never knew before what the trade wind was.  And now I am infatuated
+with it.  I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever
+mate has the watch.  Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr.
+Pike, on these delicious nights, stands his first watch after
+midnight in his pyjamas.  He is a fearfully muscular man.  Sixty-nine
+years seem impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed
+like fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge
+muscle.  A splendid figure of a man!  What he must have been in the
+hey-day of youth two score years and more ago passes comprehension.
+
+The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream.  Here,
+where time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the
+watches, where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to
+one's notice by the striking of the ship's bells fore and aft, time
+ceases.  Days merge into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for
+one, can never remember the day of the week or month.
+
+The Elsinore is never totally asleep.  Day and night, always, there
+are the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at
+the wheel, and the officer of the deck.  I lie reading in my bunk,
+which is on the weather side, and continually over my head during the
+long night hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other,
+pacing up and down, and, as I well know, the man himself is for ever
+peering for'ard from the break of the poop, or glancing into the
+binnacle, or feeling and gauging the weight and direction of wind on
+his cheek, or watching the cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud
+across the stars and the moon.  Always, always, there are wakeful
+eyes on the Elsinore.
+
+Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o'clock, as I lay with
+the printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an
+abrupt outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike.  I located him as at the
+break of the poop; and the man at whom he snarled was Larry,
+evidently on the main deck beneath him.  Not until Wada brought me
+breakfast did I learn what had occurred.
+
+Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face,
+and his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some
+unlucky whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of
+darkness on the main deck.  But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of
+the poop, had picked the offender unerringly.  This was when the
+explosion occurred.  Then the unfortunate Larry, truly half-devil and
+all child, had waxed sullen and retorted still more insolently; and
+the next he knew, the mate, descending upon him like a hurricane, had
+handcuffed him to the mizzen fife-rail.
+
+Imagine, on Mr. Pike's part, that this was one for Larry and at least
+ten for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  I'll not be so
+absurd as to say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters.  I doubt
+if he has ever experienced fear.  It is not in him.  On the other
+hand, I am confident that he apprehends trouble from these men, and
+that it was for their benefit he made this example of Larry.
+
+Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his
+stupid brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because
+he bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair
+fight.  Promptly Mr. Pike was there with the key to the handcuffs.
+As if Larry had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged
+man!  Wada reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a
+couple of front teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day.  When
+I met Mr. Pike on deck after eight o'clock I glanced at his knuckles.
+They verified Wada's tale.
+
+I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little
+events like the foregoing.  Not only has time ceased, but the world
+has ceased.  Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these
+weeks I have received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no
+visitor.  I have not been to the play.  I have not read a newspaper.
+So far as I am concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers.  All
+such things have vanished with the vanished world.  All that exists
+is the Elsinore, with her queer human freightage and her cargo of
+coal, cleaving a rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen
+miles away.
+
+I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture,
+who for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be
+alive.  Not until the world learned of his death was he anything but
+alive to the world.  By the same token, was he not alive?  And by the
+same token, here on the Elsinore, has not the land-world ceased?  May
+not the pupil of one's eye be, not merely the centre of the world,
+but the world itself?  Truly, it is tenable that the world exists
+only in consciousness.  "The world is my idea," said Schopenhauer.
+Said Jules de Gaultier, "The world is my invention."  His dogma was
+that imagination created the Real.  Ah, me, I know that the practical
+Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful
+exercise of my wits.
+
+To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read The Daughters of
+Herodias to Miss West.  It was superb in its effect--just what I had
+expected of her.  She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for
+her father while I read.  (She is never idle, being so essentially a
+nest-maker and comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a
+whole pile of these handkerchiefs for her father.)
+
+She smiled, how shall I say?--oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh,
+with all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm,
+long gray eyes, when I read:
+
+
+"But they smile innocently and dance on,
+Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:
+'Am I not beautiful?  Shall I not be loved?'
+Be patient, for they will not understand,
+Not till the end of time will they put by
+The weaving of slow steps about men's hearts."
+
+
+"But it is well for the world that it is so," was her comment.
+
+Ah, Symons knew women!  His perfect knowledge she attested when I
+read that magnificent passage:
+
+
+"They do not understand that in the world
+There grows between the sunlight and the grass
+Anything save themselves desirable.
+It seems to them that the swift eyes of men
+Are made but to be mirrors, not to see
+Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.
+'For are not we,' they say, 'the end of all?
+Why should you look beyond us?  If you look
+Into the night, you will find nothing there:
+We also have gazed often at the stars.'"
+
+
+"It is true," said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to
+see how she had received the thought.  "We also have gazed often at
+the stars."
+
+It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.
+
+"But wait," I cried.  "Let me read on."  And I read:
+
+
+"'We, we alone among all beautiful things,
+We only are real:  for the rest are dreams.
+Why will you follow after wandering dreams
+When we await you?  And you can but dream
+Of us, and in our image fashion them.'"
+
+
+"True, most true," she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and
+power mounted in her eyes.
+
+"A wonderful poem," she conceded--nay, proclaimed--when I had done.
+
+"But do you not see .  .  ."  I began impulsively, then abandoned the
+attempt.  For how could she see, being woman, the "far-off,
+disastrous, unattainable things," when she, as she so stoutly
+averred, had gazed often on the stars?
+
+She?  What could she see, save what all women see--that they only are
+real, and that all the rest are dreams.
+
+"I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias," said Miss West.
+
+"Well," I admitted lamely, "we agree.  You remember it is what I told
+you you were."
+
+"I am grateful for the compliment," she said; and in those long gray
+eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and self-
+certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so large
+a part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by
+woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+
+Heavens!--how I read in this fine weather.  I take so little exercise
+that my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions,
+such as life teems with on the land, that I read myself almost
+stupid.  Recommend me a sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind
+in his reading.  I am making up years of it.  It is an orgy, a
+debauch; and I am sure the addled sailors adjudge me the queerest
+creature on board.
+
+At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for
+any diversion.  When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the
+north-east and the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my
+little twenty-two automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot.  I
+used to shoot, when I was a wee lad.  I can remember dragging a shot-
+gun around with me over the hills.  Also, I possessed an air-rifle,
+with which, on great occasion, I was even able to slaughter a robin.
+
+While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space
+for deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from
+either side of the chart-house and that are of the width of the
+chart-house.  This space again is restricted to one side or the other
+according to the slant of the morning and afternoon sun and the
+freshness of the breeze.  Wherefore, Miss West's chair and mine are
+most frequently side by side.  Captain West has a chair, which he
+infrequently occupies.  He has so little to do in the working of the
+ship, taking his regular observations and working them up with such
+celerity, that he is rarely in the chart-room for any length of time.
+He elects to spend his hours in the main cabin, not reading, not
+doing anything save dream with eyes wide open in the draught of wind
+that pours through the open ports and door from out the huge crojack
+and the jigger staysails.
+
+Miss West is never idle.  Below, in the big after-room, she does her
+own laundering.  Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine
+linen.  In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine.  All
+hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the
+deck-chair beside me.  She avers that she loves the sea and the
+atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things
+and land-things along with her--even to her pretty china for
+afternoon tea.
+
+Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker.  She is a born
+cook.  The steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and de luxe
+for the cabin table; yet Miss West is able at a moment's notice to
+improve on these dishes.  She never lets any of their dishes come on
+the table without first planning them or passing on them.  She has
+quick judgment, an unerring taste, and is possessed of the needful
+steel of decision.  It seems she has only to look at a dish, no
+matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or its
+surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into
+something indescribably different and delicious--My, how I do eat!  I
+am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite.
+Already am I quite convinced that I am glad Miss West is making the
+voyage.
+
+She has sailed "out East," as she quaintly calls it, and has an
+enormous repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes.  In the cooking
+of rice Louis is a master; but in the making of the accompanying
+curry he fades into a blundering amateur compared with Miss West.  In
+the matter of curry she is a sheer genius.  How often one's thoughts
+dwell upon food when at sea!
+
+So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West.  I
+read all the time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to
+her passages, and even books, with which I am interested in trying
+her out.  Then, too, such reading gives rise to discussions, and she
+has not yet uttered anything that would lead me to change my first
+judgment of her.  She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.
+
+And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl.  She isn't a
+girl, she is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl.  She
+has the carriage, the attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and
+yet she cannot be described as being in the slightest degree stately.
+She is generous, dependable, sensible--yes, and sensitive; and her
+superabundant vitality, the vitality that makes her walk so
+gloriously, discounts the maturity of her.  Sometimes she seems all
+of thirty to me; at other times, when her spirits and risibilities
+are aroused, she scarcely seems thirteen.  I shall make a point of
+asking Captain West the date of the Dixie's collision with that river
+steamer in San Francisco Bay.  In a word, she is the most normal, the
+most healthy, natural woman I have ever known.
+
+Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair,
+that it is as invariably smooth and well-groomed as all the rest of
+her.  On the other hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved
+by the latitude of dress she allows herself.  She never fails of
+being a woman.  Her sex, and the lure of it, is ever present.
+Possibly she may possess high collars, but I have never seen her in
+one on board.  Her blouses are always open at the throat, disclosing
+one of her choicest assets, the muscular, adequate neck, with its
+fine-textured garmenture of skin.  I embarrass myself by stealing
+long glances at that bare throat of hers and at the hint of fine,
+firm-surfaced shoulder.
+
+Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function.  At
+least once each day we make the journey for'ard along the bridge to
+the top of the 'midship-house.  Possum, who is now convalescent,
+accompanies us.  The steward makes a point of being there so as to
+receive instructions and report the egg-output and laying conduct of
+the many hens.  At the present time our four dozen hens are laying
+two dozen eggs a day, with which record Miss West is greatly elated.
+
+Already she has given names to most of them.  The cock is Peter, of
+course.  A much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden.  A slim, trim thing
+that dogs Peter's heels she calls Cleopatra.  Another hen--the
+mellowest-voiced one of all--she addresses as Bernhardt.  One thing I
+have noted:  whenever she and the steward have passed death sentence
+on a non-laying hen (which occurs regularly once a week), she takes
+no part in the eating of the meat, not even when it is metamorphosed
+into one of her delectable curries.  At such times she has a special
+curry made for herself of tinned lobster, or shrimp, or tinned
+chicken.
+
+Ah, I must not forget.  I have learned that it was no man-interest
+(in me, if you please) that brought about her sudden interest to come
+on the voyage.  It was for her father that she came.  Something is
+the matter with Captain West.  At rare moments I have observed her
+gazing at him with a world of solicitude and anxiety in her eyes.
+
+I was telling an amusing story at table yesterday midday, when my
+glance chanced to rest upon Miss West.  She was not listening.  Her
+food on her fork was suspended in the air a sheer instant as she
+looked at her father with all her eyes.  It was a stare of fear.  She
+realized that I was observing, and with superb control, slowly, quite
+naturally, she lowered the fork and rested it on her plate, retaining
+her hold on it and retaining her father's face in her look.
+
+But I had seen.  Yes; I had seen more than that.  I had seen Captain
+West's face a transparent white, while his eyelids fluttered down and
+his lips moved noiselessly.  Then the eyelids raised, the lips set
+again with their habitual discipline, and the colour slowly returned
+to his face.  It was as if he had been away for a time and just
+returned.  But I had seen, and guessed her secret.
+
+And yet it was this same Captain West, seven hours later, who
+chastened the proud sailor spirit of Mr. Pike.  It was in the second
+dog-watch that evening, a dark night, and the watch was pulling away
+on the main deck.  I had just come out of the chart-house door and
+seen Captain West pace by me, hands in pockets, toward the break of
+the poop.  Abruptly, from the mizzen-mast, came a snap of breakage
+and crash of fabric.  At the same instant the men fell backward and
+sprawled over the deck.
+
+A moment of silence followed, and then Captain West's voice went out:
+
+"What carried away, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"The halyards, sir," came the reply out of the darkness.
+
+There was a pause.  Again Captain West's voice went out.
+
+"Next time slack away on your sheet first."
+
+Now Mr. Pike is incontestably a splendid seaman.  Yet in this
+instance he had been wrong.  I have come to know him, and I can well
+imagine the hurt to his pride.  And more--he has a wicked, resentful,
+primitive nature, and though he answered respectfully enough, "Yes,
+sir," I felt safe in predicting to myself that the poor devils under
+him would receive the weight of his resentment in the later watches
+of the night.
+
+They evidently did; for this morning I noted a black eye on John
+Hackey, a San Francisco hoodlum, and Guido Bombini was carrying a
+freshly and outrageously swollen jaw.  I asked Wada about the matter,
+and he soon brought me the news.  Quite a bit of beating up takes
+place for'ard of the deck-houses in the night watches while we of the
+after-guard peacefully slumber.
+
+Even to-day Mr. Pike is going around sullen and morose, snarling at
+the men more than usual, and barely polite to Miss West and me when
+we chance to address him.  His replies are grunted in monosyllables,
+and his face is set in superlative sourness.  Miss West who is
+unaware of the occurrence, laughs and calls it a "sea grouch"--a
+phenomenon with which she claims large experience.
+
+But I know Mr. Pike now--the stubborn, wonderful old sea-dog.  It
+will be three days before he is himself again.  He takes a terrible
+pride in his seamanship, and what hurts him most is the knowledge
+that he was guilty of the blunder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+
+To-day, twenty-eight days out, in the early morning, while I was
+drinking my coffee, still carrying the north-east trade, we crossed
+the line.  And Charles Davis signalized the event by murdering
+O'Sullivan.  It was Boney, the lanky splinter of a youth in Mr.
+Mellaire's watch, who brought the news.  The second mate and I had
+just arrived in the hospital room, when Mr. Pike entered.
+
+O'Sullivan's troubles were over.  The man in the upper bunk had
+completed the mad, sad span of his life with the marlin-spike.
+
+I cannot understand this Charles Davis.  He sat up calmly in his
+bunk, and calmly lighted his pipe ere he replied to Mr. Mellaire.  He
+certainly is not insane.  Yet deliberately, in cold blood, he has
+murdered a helpless man.
+
+"What'd you do it for?" Mr. Mellaire demanded.
+
+"Because, sir," said Charles Davis, applying a second match to his
+pipe, "because"--puff, puff--"he bothered my sleep."  Here he caught
+Mr. Pike's glowering eye.  "Because"--puff, puff--"he annoyed me.
+The next time"--puff, puff--"I hope better judgment will be shown in
+what kind of a man is put in with me.  Besides"--puff, puff--"this
+top bunk ain't no place for me.  It hurts me to get into it"--puff,
+puff--"an' I'm gem' back to that lower bunk as soon as you get
+O'Sullivan out of it."
+
+"But what'd you do it for?" Mr. Pike snarled.
+
+"I told you, sir, because he annoyed me.  I got tired of it, an' so,
+this morning, I just put him out of his misery.  An' what are you
+goin' to do about it?  The man's dead, ain't he?  An' I killed 'm in
+self-defence.  I know the law.  What right'd you to put a ravin'
+lunatic in with me, an' me sick an' helpless?"
+
+"By God, Davis!" the mate burst forth.  "You'll never draw your pay-
+day in Seattle.  I'll fix you out for this, killing a crazy lashed
+down in his bunk an' harmless.  You'll follow 'm overside, my
+hearty."
+
+"If I do, you'll hang for it, sir," Davis retorted.  He turned his
+cool eyes on me.  "An' I call on you, sir, to witness the threats
+he's made.  An' you'll testify to them, too, in court.  An' he'll
+hang as sure as I go over the side.  Oh, I know his record.  He's
+afraid to face a court with it.  He's been up too many a time with
+charges of man-killin' an' brutality on the high seas.  An' a man
+could retire for life an live off the interest of the fines he's
+paid, or his owners paid for him--"
+
+"Shut your mouth or I'll knock it out of your face!" Mr. Pike roared,
+springing toward him with clenched, up-raised fist.
+
+Davis involuntarily shrank away.  His flesh was weak, but not so his
+spirit.  He got himself promptly in hand and struck another match.
+
+"You can't get my goat, sir," he sneered, under the shadow of the
+impending blow.  "I ain't scared to die.  A man's got to die once
+anyway, an' it's none so hard a trick to do when you can't help it.
+O'Sullivan died so easy it was amazin'.  Besides, I ain't goin' to
+die.  I'm goin' to finish this voyage, an' sue the owners when I get
+to Seattle.  I know my rights an' the law.  An' I got witnesses."
+
+Truly, I was divided between admiration for the courage of this
+wretched sailor and sympathy for Mr. Pike thus bearded by a sick man
+he could not bring himself to strike.
+
+Nevertheless he sprang upon the man with calculated fury, gripped him
+between the base of the neck and the shoulders with both gnarled
+paws, and shook him back and forth, violently and frightfully, for a
+full minute.  It was a wonder the man's neck was not dislocated.
+
+"I call on you to witness, sir," Davis gasped at me the instant he
+was free.
+
+He coughed and strangled, felt his throat, and made wry neck-
+movements indicative of injury.
+
+"The marks'll begin to show in a few minutes," he murmured
+complacently as his dizziness left him and his breath came back.
+
+This was too much for Mr. Pike, who turned and left the room,
+growling and cursing incoherently, deep in his throat.  When I made
+my departure, a moment later, Davis was refilling his pipe and
+telling Mr. Mellaire that he'd have him up for a witness in Seattle.
+
+
+So we have had another burial at sea.  Mr. Pike was vexed by it
+because the Elsinore, according to sea tradition, was going too fast
+through the water for a proper ceremony.  Thus a few minutes of the
+voyage were lost by backing the Elsinore's main-topsail and deadening
+her way while the service was read and O'Sullivan was slid overboard
+with the inevitable sack of coal at his feet.
+
+"Hope the coal holds out," Mr. Pike grumbled morosely at me five
+minutes later.
+
+
+And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended on by servants,
+sipping afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and
+art, while a few feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all
+the grimy, sordid tragedy of sordid, malformed, brutish life plays
+itself out.  And Captain West, remote, untroubled, sits dreaming in
+the twilight cabin while the draught of wind from the crojack blows
+upon him through the open ports.  He has no doubts, no worries.  He
+believes in God.  All is settled and clear and well as he nears his
+far home.  His serenity is vast and enviable.  But I cannot shake
+from my eyes that vision of him when life forsook his veins, and his
+mouth slacked, and his eyelids closed, while his face took on the
+white transparency of death.
+
+I wonder who will be the next to finish the game and depart with a
+sack of coal.
+
+"Oh, this is nothing, sir," Mr. Mellaire remarked to me cheerfully as
+we strolled the poop during the first watch.  "I was once on a voyage
+on a tramp steamer loaded with four hundred Chinks--I beg your
+pardon, sir--Chinese.  They were coolies, contract labourers, coming
+back from serving their time.
+
+"And the cholera broke out.  We hove over three hundred of them
+overboard, sir, along with both bosuns, most of the Lascar crew, and
+the captain, the mate, the third mate, and the first and third
+engineers.  The second and one white oiler was all that was left
+below, and I was in command on deck, when we made port.  The doctors
+wouldn't come aboard.  They made me anchor in the outer roads and
+told me to heave out my dead.  There was some tall buryin' about that
+time, Mr. Pathurst, and they went overboard without canvas, coal, or
+iron.  They had to.  I had nobody to help me, and the Chinks below
+wouldn't lift a hand.
+
+"I had to go down myself, drag the bodies on to the slings, then
+climb on deck and heave them up with the donkey.  And each trip I
+took a drink.  I was pretty drunk when the job was done."
+
+"And you never caught it yourself?" I queried.  Mr. Mellaire held up
+his left hand.  I had often noted that the index finger was missing.
+
+"That's all that happened to me, sir.  The old man'd had a fox-
+terrier like yours.  And after the old man passed out the puppy got
+real, chummy with me.  Just as I was making the hoist of the last
+sling-load, what does the puppy do but jump on my leg and sniff my
+hand.  I turned to pat him, and the next I knew my other hand had
+slipped into the gears and that finger wasn't there any more.
+
+"Heavens!" I cried.  "What abominable luck to come through such a
+terrible experience like that and then lose your finger!"
+
+"That's what I thought, sir," Mr. Mellaire agreed.
+
+"What did you do?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, just held it up and looked at it, and said 'My goodness
+gracious!' and took another drink."
+
+"And you didn't get the cholera afterwards?"
+
+"No, sir.  I reckon I was so full of alcohol the germs dropped dead
+before they could get to me."  He considered a moment.  "Candidly,
+Mr. Pathurst, I don't know about that alcohol theory.  The old man
+and the mates died drunk, and so did the third engineer.  But the
+chief was a teetotaller, and he died, too."
+
+
+Never again shall I wonder that the sea is hard.  I walked apart from
+the second mate and stared up at the magnificent fabric of the
+Elsinore sweeping and swaying great blotting curves of darkness
+across the face of the starry sky.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+
+Something has happened.  But nobody knows, either fore or aft, except
+the interested persons, and they will not say anything.  Yet the ship
+is abuzz with rumours and guesses.
+
+This I do know:  Mr. Pike has received a fearful blow on the head.
+At table, yesterday, at midday, I arrived late, and, passing behind
+his chair, I saw a prodigious lump on top of his head.  When I was
+seated, facing him, I noted that his eyes seemed dazed; yes, and I
+could see pain in them.  He took no part in the conversation, ate
+perfunctorily, behaved stupidly at times, and it was patent that he
+was controlling himself with an iron hand.
+
+And nobody dares ask him what has happened.  I know I don't dare ask
+him, and I am a passenger, a privileged person.  This redoubtable old
+sea-relic has inspired me with a respect for him that partakes half
+of timidity and half of awe.
+
+He acts as if he were suffering from concussion of the brain.  His
+pain is evident, not alone in his eyes and the strained expression of
+his face, but by his conduct when he thinks he is unobserved.  Last
+night, just for a breath of air and a moment's gaze at the stars, I
+came out of the cabin door and stood on the main deck under the break
+of the poop.  From directly over my head came a low and persistent
+groaning.  My curiosity was aroused, and I retreated into the cabin,
+came out softly on to the poop by way of the chart-house, and
+strolled noiselessly for'ard in my slippers.  It was Mr. Pike.  He
+was leaning collapsed on the rail, his head resting on his arms.  He
+was giving voice in secret to the pain that racked him.  A dozen feet
+away he could not be heard.  But, close to his shoulder, I could hear
+his steady, smothered groaning that seemed to take the form of a
+chant.  Also, at regular intervals, he would mutter:
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."  Always he repeated
+the phrase five times, then returned to his groaning.  I stole away
+as silently as I had come.
+
+Yet he resolutely stands his watches and performs all his duties of
+chief officer.  Oh, I forgot.  Miss West dared to quiz him, and he
+replied that he had a toothache, and that if it didn't get better
+he'd pull it out.
+
+Wada cannot learn what has happened.  There were no eye-witnesses.
+He says that the Asiatic clique, discussing the affair in the cook's
+room, thinks the three gangsters are responsible.  Bert Rhine is
+carrying a lame shoulder.  Nosey Murphy is limping as from some
+injury in the hips.  And Kid Twist has been so badly beaten that he
+has not left his bunk for two days.  And that is all the data to
+build on.  The gangsters are as close-mouthed as Mr. Pike.  The
+Asiatic clique has decided that murder was attempted and that all
+that saved the mate was his hard skull.
+
+Last evening, in the second dog-watch, I got another proof that
+Captain West is not so oblivious of what goes on aboard the Elsinore
+as he seems.  I had gone for'ard along the bridge to the mizzen-mast,
+in the shadow of which I was leaning.  From the main deck, in the
+alley-way between the 'midship-house and the rail, came the voices of
+Bert Rhine, Nosey Murphy, and Mr. Mellaire.  It was not ship's work.
+They were having a friendly, even sociable chat, for their voices
+hummed genially, and now and again one or another laughed, and
+sometimes all laughed.
+
+I remembered Wada's reports on this unseamanlike intimacy of the
+second mate with the gangsters, and tried to make out the nature of
+the conversation.  But the gangsters were low-voiced, and all I could
+catch was the tone of friendliness and good-nature.
+
+Suddenly, from the poop, came Captain West's voice.  It was the
+voice, not of the Samurai riding the storm, but of the Samurai calm
+and cold.  It was clear, soft, and mellow as the mellowest bell ever
+cast by eastern artificers of old time to call worshippers to prayer.
+I know I slightly chilled to it--it was so exquisitely sweet and yet
+as passionless as the ring of steel on a frosty night.  And I knew
+the effect on the men beneath me was electrical.  I could FEEL them
+stiffen and chill to it as I had stiffened and chilled.  And yet all
+he said was:
+
+"Mr. Mellaire."
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Mellaire, after a moment of tense silence.
+
+"Come aft here," came Captain West's voice.
+
+I heard the second mate move along the deck beneath me and stop at
+the foot of the poop-ladder.
+
+"Your place is aft on the poop, Mr. Mellaire," said the cold,
+passionless voice.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the second mate.
+
+That was all.  Not another word was spoken.  Captain West resumed his
+stroll on the weather side of the poop, and Mr. Mellaire, ascending
+the ladder, went to pacing up and down the lee side.
+
+I continued along the bridge to the forecastle head and purposely
+remained there half an hour ere I returned to the cabin by way of the
+main deck.  Although I did not analyze my motive, I knew I did not
+desire any one to know that I had overheard the occurrence.
+
+
+I have made a discovery.  Ninety per cent. of our crew is brunette.
+Aft, with the exception of Wada and the steward, who are our
+servants, we are all blonds.  What led me to this discovery was
+Woodruff's Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, which I am just
+reading.  Major Woodruff's thesis is that the white-skinned, blue-
+eyed Aryan, born to government and command, ever leaving his
+primeval, overcast and foggy home, ever commands and governs the rest
+of the world and ever perishes because of the too-white light he
+encounters.  It is a very tenable hypothesis, and will bear looking
+into.
+
+But to return.  Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a
+blond Aryan.  For'ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate
+blonds, the remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us
+are brunettes.  They will not perish.  According to Woodruff, they
+will inherit the earth, not because of their capacity for mastery and
+government, but because of their skin-pigmentation which enables
+their tissues to resist the ravages of the sun.
+
+And I look at the four of us at table--Captain West, his daughter,
+Mr. Pike, and myself--all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet
+mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of
+our type on the earth.  Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and
+though we may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on
+the faces of all peoples, disciplined them to obedience, taught them
+government, and dwelt in the palaces we have compelled them by the
+weight of our own right arms to build for us.
+
+The Elsinore depicts this in miniature.  The best of the food and all
+spacious and beautiful accommodation is ours.  For'ard is a pig-sty
+and a slave-pen.
+
+As a king, Captain West sits above all.  As a captain of soldiers,
+Mr. Pike enforces his king's will.  Miss West is a princess of the
+royal house.  And I?  Am I not an honourable, noble-lineaged
+pensioner on the deeds and achievements of my father, who, in his
+day, compelled thousands of the lesser types to the building of the
+fortune I enjoy?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+
+The north-west trade carried us almost into the south-east trade, and
+then left us for several days to roll and swelter in the doldrums.
+
+During this time I have discovered that I have a genius for rifle-
+shooting.  Mr. Pike swore I must have had long practice; and I
+confess I was myself startled by the ease of the thing.  Of course,
+it's the knack; but one must be so made, I suppose, in order to be
+able to acquire the knack.
+
+By the end of half an hour, standing on the heaving deck and shooting
+at bottles floating on the rolling swell, I found that I broke each
+bottle at the first shot.  The supply of empty bottles giving out,
+Mr. Pike was so interested that he had the carpenter saw me a lot of
+small square blocks of hard wood.  These were more satisfactory.  A
+well-aimed shot threw them out of the water and spinning into the
+air, and I could use a single block until it had drifted out of
+range.  In an hour's time I could, shooting quickly and at short
+range, empty my magazine at a block and hit it nine times, and, on
+occasion, ten times, out of eleven.
+
+I might not have judged my aptitude as unusual, had I not induced
+Miss West and Wada to try their hands.  Neither had luck like mine.
+I finally persuaded Mr. Pike, and he went behind the wheel-house so
+that none of the crew might see how poor a shot he was.  He was never
+able to hit the mark, and was guilty of the most ludicrous misses.
+
+"I never could get the hang of rifle-shooting," he announced
+disgustedly, "but when it comes to close range with a gat I'm right
+there.  I guess I might as well overhaul mine and limber it up."
+
+He went below and came back with a huge '44 automatic pistol and a
+handful of loaded clips.
+
+"Anywhere from right against the body up to ten or twelve feet away,
+holding for the stomach, it's astonishing, Mr. Pathurst, what you can
+do with a weapon like this.  Now you can't use a rifle in a mix-up.
+I've been down and under, with a bunch giving me the boot, when I
+turned loose with this.  Talk about damage!  It ranged them the full
+length of their bodies.  One of them'd just landed his brogans on my
+face when I let'm have it.  The bullet entered just above his knee,
+smashed the collarbone, where it came out, and then clipped off an
+ear.  I guess that bullet's still going.  It took more than a full-
+sized man to stop it.  So I say, give me a good handy gat when
+something's doing."
+
+"Ain't you afraid you'll use all your ammunition up?" he asked
+anxiously half an hour later, as I continued to crack away with my
+new toy.
+
+He was quite reassured when I told him Wada had brought along fifty
+thousand rounds for me.
+
+In the midst of the shooting, two sharks came swimming around.  They
+were quite large, Mr. Pike said, and he estimated their length at
+fifteen feet.  It was Sunday morning, so that the crew, except for
+working the ship, had its time to itself, and soon the carpenter,
+with a rope for a fish-line and a great iron hook baited with a chunk
+of salt pork the size of my head, captured first one, and then the
+other, of the monsters.  They were hoisted in on the main deck.  And
+then I saw a spectacle of the cruelty of the sea.
+
+The full crew gathered about with sheath knives, hatchets, clubs, and
+big butcher knives borrowed from the galley.  I shall not give the
+details, save that they gloated and lusted, and roared and bellowed
+their delight in the atrocities they committed.  Finally, the first
+of the two fish was thrown back into the ocean with a pointed stake
+thrust into its upper and lower jaws so that it could not close its
+mouth.  Inevitable and prolonged starvation was the fate thus meted
+out to it.
+
+"I'll show you something, boys," Andy Fay cried, as they prepared to
+handle the second shark.
+
+The Maltese Cockney had been a most capable master of ceremonies with
+the first one.  More than anything else, I think, was I hardened
+against these brutes by what I saw them do.  In the end, the
+maltreated fish thrashed about the deck entirely eviscerated.
+Nothing remained but the mere flesh-shell of the creature, yet it
+would not die.  It was amazing the life that lingered when all the
+vital organs were gone.  But more amazing things were to follow.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs, his arms a butcher's to the elbows, without as much
+as "by your leave," suddenly thrust a hunk of meat into my hand.  I
+sprang back, startled, and dropped it to the deck, while a gleeful
+howl went up from the two-score men.  I was shamed, despite myself.
+These brutes held me in little respect; and, after all, human nature
+is so strange a compound that even a philosopher dislikes being held
+in disesteem by the brutes of his own species.
+
+I looked at what I had dropped.  It was the heart of the shark, and
+as I looked, there under my eyes, on the scorching deck where the
+pitch oozed from the seams, the heart pulsed with life.
+
+And I dared.  I would not permit these animals to laugh at any
+fastidiousness of mine.  I stooped and picked up the heart, and while
+I concealed and conquered my qualms I held it in my hand and felt it
+beat in my hand.
+
+At any rate, I had won a mild victory over Mulligan Jacobs; for he
+abandoned me for the more delectable diversion of torturing the shark
+that would not die.  For several minutes it had been lying quite
+motionless.  Mulligan Jacobs smote it a heavy blow on the nose with
+the flat of a hatchet, and as the thing galvanized into life and
+flung its body about the deck the little venomous man screamed in
+ecstasy:
+
+"The hooks are in it!--the hooks are in it!--and burnin' hot!"
+
+He squirmed and writhed with fiendish delight, and again he struck it
+on the nose and made it leap.
+
+This was too much, and I beat a retreat--feigning boredom, or
+cessation of interest, of course; and absently carrying the still
+throbbing heart in my hand.
+
+As I came upon the poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket,
+emerging from the port door of the chart-house.  The deck-chairs were
+on that side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-
+house in order to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I
+carried.  But, drying on the surface in the tropic heat and still
+pulsing inside, it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad cast.
+Instead of clearing the railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck
+there in the shade, and as I opened the door to go below and wash my
+hands, with a last glance I saw it pulse where it had fallen.
+
+When I came back it was still pulsing.  I heard a splash overside
+from the waist of the ship, and knew the carcass had been flung
+overboard.  I did not go around the chart-house and join Miss West,
+but stood enthralled by the spectacle of that heart that beat in the
+tropic heat.
+
+Boisterous shouts from the sailors attracted my attention.  They had
+all climbed to the top of the tall rail and were watching something
+outboard.  I followed their gaze and saw the amazing thing.  That
+long-eviscerated shark was not dead.  It moved, it swam, it thrashed
+about, and ever it strove to escape from the surface of the ocean.
+Sometimes it swam down as deep as fifty or a hundred feet, and then,
+still struggling to escape the surface, struggled involuntarily to
+the surface.  Each failure thus to escape fetched wild laughter from
+the men.  But why did they laugh?  The thing was sublime, horrible,
+but it was not humorous.  I leave it to you.  What is there laughable
+in the sight of a pain-distraught fish rolling helplessly on the
+surface of the sea and exposing to the sun all its essential
+emptiness?
+
+I was turning away, when renewed shouting drew my gaze.  Half a dozen
+other sharks had appeared, smaller ones, nine or ten feet long.  They
+attacked their helpless comrade.  They tore him to pieces they
+destroyed him, devoured him.  I saw the last shred of him disappear
+down their maws.  He was gone, disintegrated, entombed in the living
+bodies of his kind, and already entering into the processes of
+digestion.  And yet, there, in the shade on the pin-rail, that
+unbelievable and monstrous heart beat on.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+
+The voyage is doomed to disaster and death.  I know Mr. Pike, now,
+and if ever he discovers the identity of Mr. Mellaire, murder will be
+done.  Mr. Mellaire is not Mr. Mellaire.  He is not from Georgia.  He
+is from Virginia.  His name is Waltham--Sidney Waltham.  He is one of
+the Walthams of Virginia, a black sheep, true, but a Waltham.  Of
+this I am convinced, just as utterly as I am convinced that Mr. Pike
+will kill him if he learns who he is.
+
+Let me tell how I have discovered all this.  It was last night,
+shortly before midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff
+of the south-east trades in which we are now bowling along, close-
+hauled in order to weather Cape San Roque.  Mr. Pike had the watch,
+and I paced up and down with him while he told me old pages of his
+life.  He has often done this, when not "sea-grouched," and often he
+has mentioned with pride--yes, with reverence--a master with whom he
+sailed five years.  "Old Captain Somers," he called him--"the finest,
+squarest, noblest man I ever sailed under, sir."
+
+Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr.
+Pike, wicked old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the
+world and on the wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain
+Somers.
+
+"He was an old man, over seventy years old," Mr. Pike went on.  "And
+they say he'd got a touch of palsy--I hadn't seen him for years.  You
+see, I'd had to clear out from the coast because of trouble.  And
+that devil of a second mate caught him in bed late at night and beat
+him to death.  It was terrible.  They told me about it.  Right in San
+Francisco, on board the Jason Harrison, it happened, eleven years
+ago.
+
+"And do you know what they did?  First, they gave the murderer life,
+when he should have been hanged.  His plea was insanity, from having
+had his head chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook.
+And when he'd served seven years the governor pardoned him.  He
+wasn't any good, but his people were a powerful old Virginian family,
+the Walthams--I guess you've heard of them--and they brought all
+kinds of pressure to bear.  His name was Sidney Waltham."
+
+At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes
+before the change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated
+by the look-out on the forecastle head.  Mr. Pike, under his stress
+of feeling, had stopped walking, and we stood at the break of the
+poop.  As chance would have it, Mr. Mellaire was a quarter of an hour
+ahead of time, and he climbed the poop-ladder and stood beside us
+while the mate concluded his tale.
+
+"I didn't mind it," Mr. Pike continued, "as long as he'd got life and
+was serving his time.  But when they pardoned him out after only
+seven years I swore I'd get him.  And I will.  I don't believe in God
+or devil, and it's a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do believe in
+hunches.  And I know I'm going to get him."
+
+"What will you do?" I queried.
+
+"Do?" Mr. Pike's voice was fraught with surprise that I should not
+know.  "Do?  Well, what did he do to old Captain Somers?  Yet he's
+disappeared these last three years now.  I've heard neither hide nor
+hair of him.  But he's a sailor, and he'll drift back to the sea, and
+some day . . . "
+
+In the illumination of a match with which the second mate was
+lighting his pipe I saw Mr. Pike's gorilla arms and huge clenched
+paws raised to heaven, and his face convulsed and working.  Also, in
+that brief moment of light, I saw that the second mate's hand which
+held the match was shaking.
+
+"And I ain't never seen even a photo of him," Mr. Pike added.  "But
+I've got a general idea of his looks, and he's got a mark
+unmistakable.  I could know him by it in the dark.  All I'd have to
+do is feel it.  Some day I'll stick my fingers into that mark."
+
+"What did you say, sir, was the captain's name?" Mr. Mellaire asked
+casually.
+
+"Somers--old Captain Somers," Mr. Pike answered.
+
+Mr. Mellaire repeated the name aloud several times, and then
+hazarded:
+
+"Didn't he command the Lammermoor thirty years ago?"
+
+"That's the man."
+
+"I thought I recognized him.  I lay at anchor in a ship next to his
+in Table Bay that time ago."
+
+"Oh, the wickedness of the world, the wickedness of the world," Mr.
+Pike muttered as he turned and strode away.
+
+I said good-night to the second mate and had started to go below,
+when he called to me in a low voice, "Mr. Pathurst!"
+
+I stopped, and then he said, hurriedly and confusedly:
+
+"Never mind, sir . . . I beg your pardon . . . I--I changed my mind."
+
+Below, lying in my bunk, I found myself unable to read.  My mind was
+bent on returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my
+will, the most gruesome speculations kept suggesting themselves.
+
+And then came Mr. Mellaire.  He had slipped down the booby hatch into
+the big after-room and thence through the hallway to my room.  He
+entered noiselessly, on clumsy tiptoes, and pressed his finger
+warningly to his lips.  Not until he was beside my bunk did he speak,
+and then it was in a whisper.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, Mr. Pathurst . . . I--I beg your pardon;
+but, you see, sir, I was just passing, and seeing you awake I . . . I
+thought it would not inconvenience you to . . . you see, I thought I
+might just as well prefer a small favour . . . seeing that I would
+not inconvenience you, sir . . . I . . . I . . . "
+
+I waited for him to proceed, and in the pause that ensued, while he
+licked his dry lips with his tongue, the thing ambushed in his skull
+peered at me through his eyes and seemed almost on the verge of
+leaping out and pouncing upon me.
+
+"Well, sir," he began again, this time more coherently, "it's just a
+little thing--foolish on my part, of course--a whim, so to say--but
+you will remember, near the beginning of the voyage, I showed you a
+scar on my head . . . a really small affair, sir, which I contracted
+in a misadventure.  It amounts to a deformity, which it is my fancy
+to conceal.  Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for
+instance, know that I carried such a deformity.  A man is a man, sir-
+-you understand--and you have not spoken of it to her?"
+
+"No," I replied.  "It just happens that I have not."
+
+"Nor to anybody else?--to, say, Captain West?--or, say, Mr. Pike?"
+
+"No, I haven't mentioned it to anybody," I averred.
+
+He could not conceal the relief he experienced.  The perturbation
+went out of his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back
+deeper into the recess of his skull.
+
+"The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will
+not mention that little matter to anybody.  I suppose" (he smiled,
+and his voice was superlatively suave) "it is vanity on my part--you
+understand, I am sure."
+
+I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that
+I desired to resume my reading.
+
+"I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?"  His whole voice and
+manner had changed.  It was practically a command, and I could almost
+see fangs, bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I
+fancied dwelt behind his eyes.
+
+"Certainly," I answered coldly.
+
+"Thank you, sir--I thank you," he said, and, without more ado,
+tiptoed from the room.
+
+Of course I did not read.  How could I?  Nor did I sleep.  My mind
+ran on, and on, and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly
+before five, did I sink into my first doze.
+
+One thing is very evident.  Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer
+of Captain Somers is on board the Elsinore.  He has never glimpsed
+that prodigious fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire's, or, rather,
+Sidney Waltham's, skull.  And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike.
+And I know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate.
+And I understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within
+and peers out through the eyes.  I have recognized the same thing in
+the three gangsters for'ard.  Like the second mate, they are prison
+birds.  The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life
+has developed in all of them terrible other selves.
+
+Yes, and another thing is very evident.  On board this ship, driving
+now through the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn,
+are all the elements of sea tragedy and horror.  We are freighted
+with human dynamite that is liable at any moment to blow our tiny
+floating world to fragments.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+
+The days slip by.  The south-east trade is brisk and small splashes
+of sea occasionally invade my open ports.  Mr. Pike's room was soaked
+yesterday.  This is the most exciting thing that has happened for
+some time.  The gangsters rule in the forecastle.  Larry and Shorty
+have had a harmless FIGHT.  The hooks continue to burn in Mulligan
+Jacobs's brain.  Charles Davis resides alone in his little steel
+room, coming out only to get his food from the galley.  Miss West
+plays and sings, doctors Possum, launders, and is for ever otherwise
+busy with her fancy work.  Mr. Pike runs the phonograph every other
+evening in the second dog-watch.  Mr. Mellaire hides the cleft in his
+head.  I keep his secret.  And Captain West, more remote than ever,
+sits in the draught of wind in the twilight cabin.
+
+We are now thirty-seven days at sea, in which time, until to-day, we
+have not sighted a vessel.  And to-day, at one time, no less than six
+vessels were visible from the deck.  Not until I saw these ships was
+I able thoroughly to realize how lonely this ocean is.
+
+Mr. Pike tells me we are several hundred miles off the South American
+coast.  And yet, only the other day, it seems, we were scarcely more
+distant from Africa.  A big velvety moth fluttered aboard this
+morning, and we are filled with conjecture.  How possibly could it
+have come from the South American coast these hundreds of miles in
+the teeth of the trades?
+
+The Southern Cross has been visible, of course, for weeks; the North
+Star has disappeared behind the bulge of the earth; and the Great
+Bear, at its highest, is very low.  Soon it, too, will be gone and we
+shall be raising the Magellan Clouds.
+
+I remember the fight between Larry and Shorty.  Wada reports that Mr.
+Pike watched it for some time, until, becoming incensed at their
+awkwardness, he clouted both of them with his open hands and made
+them stop, announcing that until they could make a better showing he
+intended doing all the fighting on the Elsinore himself.
+
+It is a feat beyond me to realize that he is sixty-nine years old.
+And when I look at the tremendous build of him and at his fearful,
+man-handling hands, I conjure up a vision of him avenging Captain
+Somers's murder.
+
+Life is cruel.  Amongst the Elsinore's five thousand tons of coal are
+thousands of rats.  There is no way for them to get out of their
+steel-walled prison, for all the ventilators are guarded with stout
+wire-mesh.  On her previous voyage, loaded with barley, they
+increased and multiplied.  Now they are imprisoned in the coal, and
+cannibalism is what must occur among them.  Mr. Pike says that when
+we reach Seattle there will be a dozen or a score of survivors, huge
+fellows, the strongest and fiercest.  Sometimes, passing the mouth of
+one ventilator that is in the after wall of the chart-house, I can
+hear their plaintive squealing and crying from far beneath in the
+coal.
+
+Other and luckier rats are in the 'tween decks for'ard, where all the
+spare suits of sails are stored.  They come out and run about the
+deck at night, steal food from the galley, and lap up the dew.  Which
+reminds me that Mr. Pike will no longer look at Possum.  It seems,
+under his suggestion, that Wada trapped a rat in the donkey-engine
+room.  Wada swears that it was the father of all rats, and that, by
+actual measurement, it scaled eighteen inches from nose to the tip of
+tail.  Also, it seems that Mr. Pike and Wada, with the door shut in
+the former's room, pitted the rat against Possum, and that Possum was
+licked.  They were compelled to kill the rat themselves, while
+Possum, when all was over, lay down and had a fit.
+
+Now Mr. Pike abhors a coward, and his disgust with Possum is
+profound.  He no longer plays with the puppy, nor even speaks to him,
+and, whenever he passes him on the deck, glowers sourly at him.
+
+I have been reading up the South Atlantic Sailing Directions, and I
+find that we are now entering the most beautiful sunset region in the
+world.  And this evening we were favoured with a sample.  I was in my
+quarters, overhauling my books, when Miss West called to me from the
+foot of the chart-house stairs:
+
+"Mr. Pathurst!--Come quick!  Oh, do come quick!  You can't afford to
+miss it!"
+
+Half the sky, from the zenith to the western sea-line, was an
+astonishing sheet of pure, pale, even gold.  And through this sheen,
+on the horizon, burned the sun, a disc of richer gold.  The gold of
+the sky grew more golden, then tarnished before our eyes and began to
+glow faintly with red.  As the red deepened, a mist spread over the
+whole sheet of gold and the burning yellow sun.  Turner was never
+guilty of so audacious an orgy in gold-mist.
+
+Presently, along the horizon, entirely completing the circle of sea
+and sky, the tight-packed shapes of the trade wind clouds began to
+show through the mist; and as they took form they spilled with rose-
+colour at their upper edges, while their bases were a pulsing,
+bluish-white.  I say it advisedly.  All the colours of this display
+PULSED.
+
+As the gold-mist continued to clear away, the colours became garish,
+bold; the turquoises went into greens and the roses turned to the red
+of blood.  And the purple and indigo of the long swells of sea were
+bronzed with the colour-riot in the sky, while across the water, like
+gigantic serpents, crawled red and green sky-reflections.  And then
+all the gorgeousness quickly dulled, and the warm, tropic darkness
+drew about us.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+
+The Elsinore is truly the ship of souls, the world in miniature; and,
+because she is such a small world, cleaving this vastitude of ocean
+as our larger world cleaves space, the strange juxtapositions that
+continually occur are startling.
+
+For instance, this afternoon on the poop.  Let me describe it.  Here
+was Miss West, in a crisp duck sailor suit, immaculately white, open
+at the throat, where, under the broad collar, was knotted a man-of-
+war black silk neckerchief.  Her smooth-groomed hair, a trifle
+rebellious in the breeze, was glorious.  And here was I, in white
+ducks, white shoes, and white silk shirt, as immaculate and well-
+tended as she.  The steward was just bringing the pretty tea-service
+for Miss West, and in the background Wada hovered.
+
+We had been discussing philosophy--or, rather, I had been feeling her
+out; and from a sketch of Spinoza's anticipations of the modern mind,
+through the speculative interpretations of the latest achievements in
+physics of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Ramsay, I had come, as
+usual, to De Casseres, whom I was quoting, when Mr. Pike snarled
+orders to the watch.
+
+"'In this rise into the azure of pure perception, attainable only by
+a very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born,'."  I was
+quoting.  "'Life is no longer good or evil.  It is a perpetual play
+of forces without beginning or end.  The freed Intellect merges
+itself with the World-Will and partakes of its essence, which is not
+a moral essence but an aesthetic essence . . . "
+
+And at this moment the watch swarmed on to the poop to haul on the
+port-braces of the mizzen-sky-sail, royal and topgallant-sail.  The
+sailors passed us, or toiled close to us, with lowered eyes.  They
+did not look at us, so far removed from them were we.  It was this
+contrast that caught my fancy.  Here were the high and low, slaves
+and masters, beauty and ugliness, cleanness and filth.  Their feet
+were bare and scaled with patches of tar and pitch.  Their unbathed
+bodies were garmented in the meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty,
+ragged, and sparse.  Each one had on but two garments--dungaree
+trousers and a shoddy cotton shirt.
+
+And we, in our comfortable deck-chairs, our two servants at our
+backs, the quintessence of elegant leisure, sipped delicate tea from
+beautiful, fragile cups, and looked on at these wretched ones whose
+labour made possible the journey of our little world.  We did not
+speak to them, nor recognize their existence, any more than would
+they have dared speak to us.
+
+And Miss West, with the appraising eye of a plantation mistress for
+the condition of her field slaves, looked them over.
+
+"You see how they have fleshed up," she said, as they coiled the last
+turns of the ropes over the pins and faded away for'ard off the poop.
+"It is the regular hours, the good weather, the hard work, the open
+air, the sufficient food, and the absence of whisky.  And they will
+keep in this fettle until they get off the Horn.  And then you will
+see them go down from day to day.  A winter passage of the Horn is
+always a severe strain on the men.
+
+"But then, once we are around and in the good weather of the Pacific,
+you will see them gain again from day to day.  And when we reach
+Seattle they will be in splendid shape.  Only they will go ashore,
+drink up their wages in several days, and ship away on other vessels
+in precisely the same sodden, miserable condition that they were in
+when they sailed with us from Baltimore."
+
+And just then Captain West came out the chart-house door, strolled by
+for a single turn up and down, and with a smile and a word for us and
+an all-observant eye for the ship, the trim of her sails, the wind,
+and the sky, and the weather promise, went back through the chart-
+house door--the blond Aryan master, the king, the Samurai.
+
+And I finished sipping my tea of delicious and most expensive aroma,
+and our slant-eyed, dark-skinned servitors carried the pretty gear
+away, and I read, continuing De Casseres:
+
+"'Instinct wills, creates, carries on the work of the species.  The
+Intellect destroys, negatives, satirizes and ends in pure nihilism,
+instinct creates life, endlessly, hurling forth profusely and blindly
+its clowns, tragedians and comedians.  Intellect remains the eternal
+spectator of the play.  It participates at will, but never gives
+itself wholly to the fine sport.  The Intellect, freed from the
+trammels of the personal will, soars into the ether of perception,
+where Instinct follows it in a thousand disguises, seeking to draw it
+down to earth.'"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+
+We are now south of Rio and working south.  We are out of the
+latitude of the trades, and the wind is capricious.  Rain squalls and
+wind squalls vex the Elsinore.  One hour we may be rolling
+sickeningly in a dead calm, and the next hour we may be dashing
+fourteen knots through the water and taking off sail as fast as the
+men can clew up and lower away.  A night of calm, when sleep is well-
+nigh impossible in the sultry, muggy air, may be followed by a day of
+blazing sun and an oily swell from the south'ard, connoting great
+gales in that area of ocean we are sailing toward--or all day long
+the Elsinore, under an overcast sky, royals and sky sails furled, may
+plunge and buck under wind-pressure into a short and choppy head-sea.
+
+And all this means work for the men.  Taking Mr. Pike's judgment,
+they are very inadequate, though by this time they know the ropes.
+He growls and grumbles, and snorts and sneers whenever he watches
+them doing anything.  To-day, at eleven in the morning, the wind was
+so violent, continuing in greater gusts after having come in a great
+gust, that Mr. Pike ordered the mainsail taken off.  The great
+crojack was already off.  But the watch could not clew up the
+mainsail, and, after much vain sing-songing and pull-hauling, the
+watch below was routed out to bear a hand.
+
+"My God!" Mr. Pike groaned to me.  "Two watches for a rag like that
+when half a decent watch could do it!  Look at that preventer bosun
+of mine!"
+
+Poor Nancy!  He looked the saddest, sickest, bleakest creature I had
+ever seen.  He was so wretched, so miserable, so helpless.  And
+Sundry Buyers was just as impotent.  The expression on his face was
+of pain and hopelessness, and as he pressed his abdomen he lumbered
+futilely about, ever seeking something he might do and ever failing
+to find it.  He pottered.  He would stand and stare at one rope for a
+minute or so at a time, following it aloft with his eyes through the
+maze of ropes and stabs and gears with all the intentness of a man
+working out an intricate problem.  Then, holding his hand against his
+stomach, he would lumber on a few steps and select another rope for
+study.
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," Mr. Pike lamented.  "How can one drive with
+bosuns like that and a crew like that?  Just the same, if I was
+captain of this ship I'd drive 'em.  I'd show 'em what drive was, if
+I had to lose a few of them.  And when they grow weak off the Horn
+what'll we do?  It'll be both watches all the time, which will weaken
+them just that much the faster."
+
+Evidently this winter passage of the Horn is all that one has been
+led to expect from reading the narratives of the navigators.  Iron
+men like the two mates are very respectful of "Cape Stiff," as they
+call that uttermost tip of the American continent.  Speaking of the
+two mates, iron-made and iron-mouthed that they are, it is amusing
+that in really serious moments both of them curse with "Oh dear, oh
+dear."
+
+In the spells of calm I take great delight in the little rifle.  I
+have already fired away five thousand rounds, and have come to
+consider myself an expert.  Whatever the knack of shooting may be,
+I've got it.  When I get back I shall take up target practice.  It is
+a neat, deft sport.
+
+Not only is Possum afraid of the sails and of rats, but he is afraid
+of rifle-fire, and at the first discharge goes yelping and ki-yi-ing
+below.  The dislike Mr. Pike has developed for the poor little puppy
+is ludicrous.  He even told me that if it were his dog he'd throw it
+overboard for a target.  Just the same, he is an affectionate, heart-
+warming little rascal, and has already crept so deep into my heart
+that I am glad Miss West did not accept him.
+
+And--oh!--he insists on sleeping with me on top the bedding; a
+proceeding which has scandalized the mate.  "I suppose he'll be using
+your toothbrush next," Mr. Pike growled at me.  But the puppy loves
+my companionship, and is never happier than when on the bed with me.
+Yet the bed is not entirely paradise, for Possum is badly frightened
+when ours is the lee side and the seas pound and smash against the
+glass ports.  Then the little beggar, electric with fear to every
+hair tip, crouches and snarls menacingly and almost at the same time
+whimpers appeasingly at the storm-monster outside.
+
+"Father KNOWS the sea," Miss West said to me this afternoon.  "He
+understands it, and he loves it."
+
+"Or it may be habit," I ventured.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"He does know it.  And he loves it.  That is why he has come back to
+it.  All his people before him were sea folk.  His grandfather,
+Anthony West, made forty-six voyages between 1801 and 1847.  And his
+father, Robert, sailed master to the north-west coast before the gold
+days and was captain of some of the fastest Cape Horn clippers after
+the gold discovery.  Elijah West, father's great-grandfather, was a
+privateersman in the Revolution.  He commanded the armed brig New
+Defence.  And, even before that, Elijah's father, in turn, and
+Elijah's father's father, were masters and owners on long-voyage
+merchant adventures.
+
+"Anthony West, in 1813 and 1814, commanded the David Bruce, with
+letters of marque.  He was half-owner, with Gracie & Sons as the
+other half-owners.  She was a two-hundred-ton schooner, built right
+up in Maine.  She carried a long eighteen-pounder, two ten-pounders,
+and ten six-pounders, and she sailed like a witch.  She ran the
+blockade off Newport and got away to the English Channel and the Bay
+of Biscay.  And, do you know, though she only cost twelve thousand
+dollars all told, she took over three hundred thousand dollars of
+British prizes.  A brother of his was on the Wasp.
+
+"So, you see, the sea is in our blood.  She is our mother.  As far
+back as we can trace all our line was born to the sea."  She laughed
+and went on.  "We've pirates and slavers in our family, and all sorts
+of disreputable sea-rovers.  Old Ezra West, just how far back I don't
+remember, was executed for piracy and his body hung in chains at
+Plymouth.
+
+"The sea is father's blood.  And he knows, well, a ship, as you would
+know a dog or a horse.  Every ship he sails has a distinct
+personality for him.  I have watched him, in high moments, and SEEN
+him think.  But oh! the times I have seen him when he does not think-
+-when he FEELS and knows everything without thinking at all.  Really,
+with all that appertains to the sea and ships, he is an artist.
+There is no other word for it."
+
+"You think a great deal of your father," I remarked.
+
+"He is the most wonderful man I have ever known," she replied.
+"Remember, you are not seeing him at his best.  He has never been the
+same since mother's death.  If ever a man and woman were one, they
+were."  She broke off, then concluded abruptly.  "You don't know him.
+You don't know him at all."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+
+"I think we are going to have a fine sunset," Captain West remarked
+last evening.
+
+Miss West and I abandoned our rubber of cribbage and hastened on
+deck.  The sunset had not yet come, but all was preparing.  As we
+gazed we could see the sky gathering the materials, grouping the gray
+clouds in long lines and towering masses, spreading its palette with
+slow-growing, glowing tints and sudden blobs of colour.
+
+"It's the Golden Gate!" Miss West cried, indicating the west.  "See!
+We're just inside the harbour.  Look to the south there.  If that
+isn't the sky-line of San Francisco!  There's the Call Building, and
+there, far down, the Ferry Tower, and surely that is the Fairmount."
+Her eyes roved back through the opening between the cloud masses, and
+she clapped her hands.  "It's a sunset within a sunset!  See!  The
+Farallones!"--swimming in a miniature orange and red sunset all their
+own.  "Isn't it the Golden Gate, and San Francisco, and the
+Farallones?"  She appealed to Mr. Pike, who, leaning near, on the
+poop-rail, was divided between gazing sourly at Nancy pottering on
+the main deck and sourly at Possum, who, on the bridge, crouched with
+terror each time the crojack flapped emptily above him.
+
+The mate turned his head and favoured the sky picture with a solemn
+stare.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he growled.  "It may look like the Farallones to
+you, but to me it looks like a battleship coming right in the Gate
+with a bone in its teeth at a twenty-knot clip."
+
+Sure enough.  The floating Farallones had metamorphosed into a giant
+warship.
+
+Then came the colour riot, the dominant tone of which was green.  It
+was green, green, green--the blue-green of the springing year, and
+sere and yellow green and tawny-brown green of autumn.  There were
+orange green, gold green, and a copper green.  And all these greens
+were rich green beyond description; and yet the richness and the
+greenness passed even as we gazed upon it, going out of the gray
+clouds and into the sea, which assumed the exquisite golden pink of
+polished copper, while the hollows of the smooth and silken ripples
+were touched by a most ethereal pea green.
+
+The gray clouds became a long, low swathe of ruby red, or garnet red-
+-such as one sees in a glass of heavy burgundy when held to the
+light.  There was such depth to this red!  And, below it, separated
+from the main colour-mass by a line of gray-white fog, or line of
+sea, was another and smaller streak of ruddy-coloured wine.
+
+I strolled across the poop to the port side.
+
+"Oh!  Come back!  Look!  Look!" Miss West cried to me.
+
+"What's the use?" I answered.  "I've something just as good over
+here."
+
+She joined me, and as she did so I noted, a sour grin on Mr. Pike's
+face.
+
+The eastern heavens were equally spectacular.  That quarter of the
+sky was sheer and delicate shell of blue, the upper portions of which
+faded, changed, through every harmony, into a pale, yet warm, rose,
+all trembling, palpitating, with misty blue tinting into pink.  The
+reflection of this coloured sky-shell upon the water made of the sea
+a glimmering watered silk, all changeable, blue, Nile-green, and
+salmon-pink.  It was silky, silken, a wonderful silk that veneered
+and flossed the softly moving, wavy water.
+
+And the pale moon looked like a wet pearl gleaming through the tinted
+mist of the sky-shell.
+
+In the southern quadrant of the sky we discovered an entirely
+different sunset--what would be accounted a very excellent orange-
+and-red sunset anywhere, with grey clouds hanging low and lighted and
+tinted on all their under edges.
+
+"Huh!" Mr. Pike muttered gruffly, while we were exclaiming over our
+fresh discovery.  "Look at the sunset I got here to the north.  It
+ain't doing so badly now, I leave it to you."
+
+And it wasn't.  The northern quadrant was a great fen of colour and
+cloud, that spread ribs of feathery pink, fleece-frilled, from the
+horizon to the zenith.  It was all amazing.  Four sunsets at the one
+time in the sky!  Each quadrant glowed, and burned, and pulsed with a
+sunset distinctly its own.
+
+And as the colours dulled in the slow twilight, the moon, still
+misty, wept tears of brilliant, heavy silver into the dim lilac sea.
+And then came the hush of darkness and the night, and we came to
+ourselves, out of reverie, sated with beauty, leaning toward each
+other as we leaned upon the rail side by side.
+
+
+I never grow tired of watching Captain West.  In a way he bears a
+sort of resemblance to several of Washington's portraits.  He is six
+feet of aristocratic thinness, and has a very definite, leisurely and
+stately grace of movement.  His thinness is almost ascetic.  In
+appearance and manner he is the perfect old-type New England
+gentleman.
+
+He has the same gray eyes as his daughter, although his are genial
+rather than warm; and his eyes have the same trick of smiling.  His
+skin is pinker than hers, and his brows and lashes are fairer.  But
+he seems removed beyond passion, or even simple enthusiasm.  Miss
+West is firm, like her father; but there is warmth in her firmness.
+He is clean, he is sweet and courteous; but he is coolly sweet,
+coolly courteous.  With all his certain graciousness, in cabin or on
+deck, so far as his social equals are concerned, his graciousness is
+cool, elevated, thin.
+
+He is the perfect master of the art of doing nothing.  He never
+reads, except the Bible; yet he is never bored.  Often, I note him in
+a deck-chair, studying his perfect finger-nails, and, I'll swear, not
+seeing them at all.  Miss West says he loves the sea.  And I ask
+myself a thousand times, "But how?" He shows no interest in any phase
+of the sea.  Although he called our attention to the glorious sunset
+I have just described, he did not remain on deck to enjoy it.  He sat
+below, in the big leather chair, not reading, not dozing, but merely
+gazing straight before him at nothing.
+
+
+The days pass, and the seasons pass.  We left Baltimore at the tail-
+end of winter, went into spring and on through summer, and now we are
+in fall weather and urging our way south to the winter of Cape Horn.
+And as we double the Cape and proceed north, we shall go through
+spring and summer--a long summer--pursuing the sun north through its
+declination and arriving at Seattle in summer.  And all these seasons
+have occurred, and will have occurred, in the space of five months.
+
+Our white ducks are gone, and, in south latitude thirty-five, we are
+wearing the garments of a temperate clime.  I notice that Wada has
+given me heavier underclothes and heavier pyjamas, and that Possum,
+of nights, is no longer content with the top of the bed but must
+crawl underneath the bed-clothes.
+
+
+We are now off the Plate, a region notorious for storms, and Mr. Pike
+is on the lookout for a pampero.  Captain West does not seem to be on
+the lookout for anything; yet I notice that he spends longer hours on
+deck when the sky and barometer are threatening.
+
+Yesterday we had a hint of Plate weather, and to-day an awesome
+fiasco of the same.  The hint came last evening between the twilight
+and the dark.  There was practically no wind, and the Elsinore, just
+maintaining steerage way by means of intermittent fans of air from
+the north, floundered exasperatingly in a huge glassy swell that
+rolled up as an echo from some blown-out storm to the south.
+
+Ahead of us, arising with the swiftness of magic, was a dense slate-
+blackness.  I suppose it was cloud-formation, but it bore no
+semblance to clouds.  It was merely and sheerly a blackness that
+towered higher and higher until it overhung us, while it spread to
+right and left, blotting out half the sea.
+
+And still the light puffs from the north filled our sails; and still,
+as the Elsinore floundered on the huge, smooth swells and the sails
+emptied and flapped a hollow thunder, we moved slowly towards that
+ominous blackness.  In the cast, in what was quite distinctly an
+active thunder cloud, the lightning fairly winked, while the
+blackness in front of us was rent with blobs and flashes of
+lightning.
+
+The last puffs left us, and in the hushes, between the rumbles of the
+nearing thunder, the voices of the men aloft on the yards came to
+one's ear as if they were right beside one instead of being hundreds
+of feet away and up in the air.  That they were duly impressed by
+what was impending was patent from the earnestness with which they
+worked.  Both watches toiled under both mates, and Captain West
+strolled the poop in his usual casual way, and gave no orders at all,
+save in low conventional tones, when Mr. Pike came upon the poop and
+conferred with him.
+
+Miss West, having deserted the scene five minutes before, returned, a
+proper sea-woman, clad in oil-skins, sou'wester, and long sea-boots.
+She ordered me, quite peremptorily, to do the same.  But I could not
+bring myself to leave the deck for fear of missing something, so I
+compromised by having Wada bring my storm-gear to me.
+
+And then the wind came, smack out of the blackness, with the
+abruptness of thunder and accompanied by the most diabolical thunder.
+And with the rain and thunder came the blackness.  It was tangible.
+It drove past us in the bellowing wind like so much stuff that one
+could feel.  Blackness as well as wind impacted on us.  There is no
+other way to describe it than by the old, ancient old, way of saying
+one could not see his hand before his face.
+
+"Isn't it splendid!" Miss West shouted into my ear, close beside me,
+as we clung to the railing of the break of the poop.
+
+"Superb!" I shouted back, my lips to her ear, so that her hair
+tickled my face.
+
+And, I know not why--it must have been spontaneous with both of us--
+in that shouting blackness of wind, as we clung to the rail to avoid
+being blown away, our hands went out to each other and my hand and
+hers gripped and pressed and then held mutually to the rail.
+
+"Daughter of Herodias," I commented grimly to myself; but my hand did
+not leave hers.
+
+"What is happening?" I shouted in her ear.
+
+"We've lost way," came her answer.  "I think we're caught aback!  The
+wheel's up, but she could not steer!"
+
+The Gabriel voice of the Samurai rang out.  "Hard over?" was his
+mellow storm-call to the man at the wheel.  "Hard over, sir," came
+the helmsman's reply, vague, cracked with strain, and smothered.
+
+Came the lightning, before us, behind us, on every side, bathing us
+in flaming minutes at a time.  And all the while we were deafened by
+the unceasing uproar of thunder.  It was a weird sight--far aloft the
+black skeleton of spars and masts from which the sails had been
+removed; lower down, the sailors clinging like monstrous bugs as they
+passed the gaskets and furled; beneath them the few set sails, filled
+backward against the masts, gleaming whitely, wickedly, evilly, in
+the fearful illumination; and, at the bottom, the deck and bridge and
+houses of the Elsinore, and a tangled riff-raff of flying ropes, and
+clumps and bunches of swaying, pulling, hauling, human creatures.
+
+It was a great moment, the master's moment--caught all aback with all
+our bulk and tonnage and infinitude of gear, and our heaven-aspiring
+masts two hundred feet above our heads.  And our master was there, in
+sheeting flame, slender, casual, imperturbable, with two men--one of
+them a murderer--under him to pass on and enforce his will, and with
+a horde of inefficients and weaklings to obey that will, and pull,
+and haul, and by the sheer leverages of physics manipulate our
+floating world so that it would endure this fury of the elements.
+
+What happened next, what was done, I do not know, save that now and
+again I heard the Gabriel voice; for the darkness came, and the rain
+in pouring, horizontal sheets.  It filled my mouth and strangled my
+lungs as if I had fallen overboard.  It seemed to drive up as well as
+down, piercing its way under my sou'wester, through my oilskins, down
+my tight-buttoned collar, and into my sea-boots.  I was dizzied,
+obfuscated, by all this onslaught of thunder, lightning, wind,
+blackness, and water.  And yet the master, near to me, there on the
+poop, lived and moved serenely in all, voicing his wisdom and will to
+the wisps of creatures who obeyed and by their brute, puny strength
+pulled braces, slacked sheets, dragged courses, swung yards and
+lowered them, hauled on buntlines and clewlines, smoothed and
+gasketed the huge spreads of canvas.
+
+How it happened I know not, but Miss West and I crouched together,
+clinging to the rail and to each other in the shelter of the
+thrumming weather-cloth.  My arm was about her and fast to the
+railing; her shoulder pressed close against me, and by one hand she
+held tightly to the lapel of my oilskin.
+
+An hour later we made our way across the poop to the chart-house,
+helping each other to maintain footing as the Elsinore plunged and
+bucked in the rising sea and was pressed over and down by the weight
+of wind on her few remaining set sails.  The wind, which had lulled
+after the rain, had risen in recurrent gusts to storm violence.  But
+all was well with the gallant ship.  The crisis was past, and the
+ship lived, and we lived, and with streaming faces and bright eyes we
+looked at each other and laughed in the bright light of the chart-
+room.
+
+"Who can blame one for loving the sea?" Miss West cried out
+exultantly, as she wrung the rain from her ropes of hair which had
+gone adrift in the turmoil.  "And the men of the sea!" she cried.
+"The masters of the sea!  You saw my father . . . "
+
+"He is a king," I said.
+
+"He is a king," she repeated after me.
+
+And the Elsinore lifted on a cresting sea and flung down on her side,
+so that we were thrown together and brought up breathless against the
+wall.
+
+I said good-night to her at the foot of the stairs, and as I passed
+the open door to the cabin I glanced in.  There sat Captain West,
+whom I had thought still on deck.  His storm-trappings were removed,
+his sea-boots replaced by slippers; and he leaned back in the big
+leather chair, eyes wide open, beholding visions in the curling smoke
+of a cigar against a background of wildly reeling cabin wall.
+
+It was at eleven this morning that the Plate gave us a fiasco.  Last
+night's was a real pampero--though a mild one.  To-day's promised to
+be a far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke.
+The wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning
+we had all our topgallant-sails set.  By ten we were rolling in a
+dead calm.  By eleven the stuff began making up ominously in the
+south'ard.
+
+The overcast sky closed down.  Our lofty trucks seemed to scrape the
+cloud-zenith.  The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half
+a mile away.  The Elsinore was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and
+sea.  The lightning played.  Sky and horizon drew so close that the
+Elsinore seemed on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it,
+sucked up by it.
+
+Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked
+lightning, and the wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green.  The
+rain, beginning gently, in dead calm, grew into a deluge of enormous
+streaming drops.  It grew darker and darker, a green darkness, and in
+the cabin, although it was midday, Wada and the steward lighted
+lamps.  The lightning came closer and closer, until the ship was
+enveloped in it.  The green darkness was continually a-tremble with
+flame, through which broke greater illuminations of forked lightning.
+These became more violent as the rain lessened, and, so absolutely
+were we centred in this electrical maelstrom, there was no connecting
+any chain or flash or fork of lightning with any particular thunder-
+clap.  The atmosphere all about us paled and flamed.  Such a crashing
+and smashing!  We looked every moment for the Elsinore to be struck.
+And never had I seen such colours in lightning.  Although from moment
+to moment we were dazzled by the greater bolts, there persisted
+always a tremulous, pulsing lesser play of light, sometimes softly
+blue, at other times a thin purple that quivered on into a thousand
+shades of lavender.
+
+And there was no wind.  No wind came.  Nothing happened.  The
+Elsinore, naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and
+crojack furled, was prepared for anything.  Her lower-topsails hung
+in limp emptiness from the yards, heavy with rain and flapping
+soggily when she rolled.  The cloud mass thinned, the day brightened,
+the green blackness passed into gray twilight, the lightning eased,
+the thunder moved along away from us, and there was no wind.  In half
+an hour the sun was shining, the thunder muttered intermittently
+along the horizon, and the Elsinore still rolled in a hush of air.
+
+"You can't tell, sir," Mr. Pike growled to me.  "Thirty years ago I
+was dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come on
+just as that come on."
+
+It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on
+the poop to relieve the mate, stood beside me.
+
+"One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world," he concurred.
+"Eighteen years ago the Plate gave it to me--lost half our sticks,
+twenty hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered.  I was
+two days in the boat before an English tramp picked us up.  And none
+of the other boats ever was picked up."
+
+"The Elsinore behaved very well last night," I put in cheerily.
+
+"Oh, hell, that wasn't nothing," Mr. Pike grumbled.  "Wait till you
+see a real pampero.  It's a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one,
+'ll be glad when we get across It.  I'd sooner have a dozen Cape Horn
+snorters than one of these.  How about you, Mr. Mellaire?"
+
+"Same here, sir," he answered.  "Those sou'-westers are honest.  You
+know what to expect.  But here you never know.  The best of ship-
+masters can get tripped up off the Plate."
+
+
+"'As I've found out .  .
+Beyond a doubt,"
+
+
+Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb's Celeste, as he went down the ladder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+
+The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the
+Argentine.  Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden,
+flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while
+in the east was painted a second sunset--a reflection, perhaps, of
+the first.  At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds
+that shed soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea.
+
+And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the
+west.  Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier,
+spacious and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times
+vaster and more celestial than that of the Colorado.  The clouds took
+on the same stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the
+hollows were filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the
+Painted Lands.
+
+The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to
+the dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across
+the pampas of the Argentine.
+
+And our sunset to-night--I am writing this at midnight, as I sit
+propped in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the Elsinore wallows
+damnably in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape
+Horn region, where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow.  But our
+sunset.  Turner might have perpetrated it.  The west was as if a
+painter had stood off and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green
+canvas.  On this green background of sky the clouds spilled and
+crumpled.
+
+But such a background!  Such an orgy of green!  No shade of green was
+missing in the interstices, large and small, between the milky,
+curdled clouds--Nile-green high up, and then, in order, each with a
+thousand shades, blue-green, brown-green, grey-green, and a wonderful
+olive-green that tarnished into a rich bronze-green.
+
+During the display the rest of the horizon glowed with broad bands of
+pink, and blue, and pale green, and yellow.  A little later, when the
+sun was quite down, in the background of the curdled clouds
+smouldered a wine-red mass of colour, that faded to bronze and tinged
+all the fading greens with its sanguinary hue.  The clouds themselves
+flushed to rose of all shades, while a fan of gigantic streamers of
+pale rose radiated toward the zenith.  These deepened rapidly into
+flaunting rose-flame and burned long in the slow-closing twilight.
+
+And with all this wonder of the beauty of the world still glowing in
+my brain hours afterward, I hear the snarling of Mr. Pike above my
+head, and the trample and drag of feet as the men move from rope to
+rope and pull and haul.  More weather is making, and from the way
+sail is being taken in it cannot be far off.
+
+
+Yet at daylight this morning we were still wallowing in the same dead
+calm and sickly swell.  Miss West says the barometer is down, but
+that the warning has been too long, for the Plate, to amount to
+anything.  Pamperos happen quickly here, and though the Elsinore,
+under bare poles to her upper-topsails, is prepared for anything, it
+may well be that they will be crowding on canvas in another hour.
+
+Mr. Pike was so fooled that he actually had set the topgallant-sails,
+and the gaskets were being taken off the royals, when the Samurai
+came on deck, strolled back and forth a casual five minutes, then
+spoke in an undertone to Mr. Pike.  Mr. Pike did not like it.  To me,
+a tyro, it was evident that he disagreed with his master.
+Nevertheless, his voice went out in a snarl aloft to the men on the
+royal-yards to make all fast again.  Then it was clewlines and
+buntlines and lowering of yards as the topgallant-sails were stripped
+off.  The crojack was taken in, and some of the outer fore-and-aft
+handsails, whose order of names I can never remember.
+
+A breeze set in from the south-west, blowing briskly under a clear
+sky.  I could see that Mr. Pike was secretly pleased.  The Samurai
+had been mistaken.  And each time Mr. Pike glanced aloft at the naked
+topgallant- and royal-yards, I knew his thought was that they might
+well be carrying sail.  I was quite convinced that the Plate had
+fooled Captain West.  So was Miss West convinced, and, being a
+favoured person like myself, she frankly told me so.
+
+"Father will be setting sail in half an hour," she prophesied.
+
+What superior weather-sense Captain West possesses I know not, save
+that it is his by Samurai right.  The sky, as I have said, was clear.
+The air was brittle--sparkling gloriously in the windy sun.  And yet,
+behold, in a brief quarter of an hour, the change that took place.  I
+had just returned from a trip below, and Miss West was venting her
+scorn on the River Plate and promising to go below to the sewing-
+machine, when we heard Mr. Pike groan.  It was a whimsical groan of
+disgust, contrition, and acknowledgment of inferiority before the
+master.
+
+"Here comes the whole River Plate," was what he groaned.
+
+Following his gaze to the south-west, we saw it coming.  It was a
+cloud-mass that blotted out the sunlight and the day.  It seemed to
+swell and belch and roll over and over on itself as it advanced with
+a rapidity that told of enormous wind behind it and in it.  Its speed
+was headlong, terrific; and, beneath it, covering the sea, advancing
+with it, was a gray bank of mist.
+
+Captain West spoke to the mate, who bawled the order along, and the
+watch, reinforced by the watch below, began dewing up the mainsail
+and foresail and climbing into the rigging.
+
+"Keep off!  Put your wheel over!  Hard over!" Captain West called
+gently to the helmsman.
+
+And the big wheel spun around, and the Elsinore's bow fell off so
+that she might not be caught aback by the onslaught of wind.
+
+Thunder rode in that rushing, rolling blackness of cloud; and it was
+rent by lightning as it fell upon us.
+
+Then it was rain, wind, obscureness of gloom, and lightning.  I
+caught a glimpse of the men on the lower-yards as they were blotted
+from view and as the Elsinore heeled over and down.  There were
+fifteen men of them to each yard, and the gaskets were well passed
+ere we were struck.  How they regained the deck I do not know, I
+never saw; for the Elsinore, under only upper- and lower-topsails,
+lay down on her side, her port-rail buried in the sea, and did not
+rise.
+
+There was no maintaining an unsupported upright position on that
+acute slant of deck.  Everybody held on.  Mr. Pike frankly gripped
+the poop-rail with both hands, and Miss West and I made frantic
+clutches and scrambled for footing.  But I noticed that the Samurai,
+poised lightly, like a bird on the verge of flight, merely rested one
+hand on the rail.  He gave no orders.  As I divined, there was
+nothing to be done.  He waited--that was all--in tranquillity and
+repose.  The situation was simple.  Either the masts would go, or the
+Elsinore would rise with her masts intact, or she would never rise
+again.
+
+In the meantime she lay dead, her lee yardarms almost touching the
+sea, the sea creaming solidly to her hatch-combings across the
+buried, unseen rail.
+
+The minutes were as centuries, until the bow paid off and the
+Elsinore, turned tail before it, righted to an even keel.
+Immediately this was accomplished Captain West had her brought back
+upon the wind.  And immediately, thereupon, the big foresail went
+adrift from its gaskets.  The shock, or succession of shocks, to the
+ship, from the tremendous buffeting that followed, was fearful.  It
+seemed she was being racked to pieces.  Master and mate were side by
+side when this happened, and the expressions on their faces typified
+them.  In neither face was apprehension.  Mr. Pike's face bore a sour
+sneer for the worthless sailors who had botched the job.  Captain
+West's face was serenely considerative.
+
+Still, nothing was to be done, could be done; and for five minutes
+the Elsinore was shaken as in the maw of some gigantic monster, until
+the last shreds of the great piece of canvas had been torn away.
+
+"Our foresail has departed for Africa," Miss West laughed in my ear.
+
+She is like her father, unaware of fear.
+
+"And now we may as well go below and be comfortable," she said five
+minutes later.  "The worst is over.  It will only be blow, blow,
+blow, and a big sea making."
+
+
+All day it blew.  And the big sea that arose made the Elsinore's
+conduct almost unlivable.  My only comfort was achieved by taking to
+my bunk and wedging myself with pillows buttressed against the bunk's
+sides by empty soap-boxes which Wada arranged.  Mr. Pike, clinging to
+my door-casing while his legs sprawled adrift in a succession of
+terrific rolls, paused to tell me that it was a new one on him in the
+pampero line.  It was all wrong from the first.  It had not come on
+right.  It had no reason to be.
+
+He paused a little longer, and, in a casual way, that under the
+circumstances was ridiculously transparent, exposed what was at
+ferment in his mind.
+
+First of all he was absurd enough to ask if Possum showed symptoms of
+sea-sickness.  Next, he unburdened his wrath for the inefficients who
+had lost the foresail, and sympathized with the sail-makers for the
+extra work thrown upon them.  Then he asked permission to borrow one
+of my books, and, clinging to my bunk, selected Buchner's Force and
+Matter from my shelf, carefully wedging the empty space with the
+doubled magazine I use for that purpose.
+
+Still he was loth to depart, and, cudgelling his brains for a
+pretext, he set up a rambling discourse on River Plate weather.  And
+all the time I kept wondering what was behind it all.  At last it
+came.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Pathurst," he remarked, "do you happen to remember
+how many years ago Mr. Mellaire said it was that he was dismasted and
+foundered off here?"
+
+I caught his drift on the instant.
+
+"Eight years ago, wasn't it?" I lied.
+
+Mr. Pike let this sink in and slowly digested it, while the Elsinore
+was guilty of three huge rolls down to port and back again.
+
+"Now I wonder what ship was sunk off the Plate eight years ago?" he
+communed, as if with himself.  "I guess I'll have to ask Mr. Mellaire
+her name.  You can search me for all any I can recollect."
+
+He thanked me with unwonted elaborateness for Force and Matter, of
+which I knew he would never read a line, and felt his way to the
+door.  Here he hung on for a moment, as if struck by a new and most
+accidental idea.
+
+"Now it wasn't, by any chance, that he said eighteen years ago?" he
+queried.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Eight years ago," I said.  "That's the way I remember it, though why
+I should remember it at all I don't know.  But that is what he said,"
+I went on with increasing confidence.  "Eight years ago.  I am sure
+of it."
+
+Mr. Pike looked at me ponderingly, and waited until the Elsinore had
+fairly righted for an instant ere he took his departure down the
+hall.
+
+I think I have followed the working of his mind.  I have long since
+learned that his memory of ships, officers, cargoes, gales, and
+disasters is remarkable.  He is a veritable encyclopaedia of the sea.
+Also, it is patent that he has equipped himself with Sidney Waltham's
+history.  As yet, he does not dream that Mr. Mellaire is Sidney
+Waltham, and he is merely wondering if Mr. Mellaire was a ship-mate
+of Sidney Waltham eighteen years ago in the ship lost off the Plate.
+
+In the meantime, I shall never forgive Mr. Mellaire for this slip he
+has made.  He should have been more careful.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+
+An abominable night!  A wonderful night!  Sleep?  I suppose I did
+sleep, in catnaps, but I swear I heard every bell struck until three-
+thirty.  Then came a change, an easement.  No longer was it a
+stubborn, loggy fight against pressures.  The Elsinore moved.  I
+could feel her slip, and slide, and send, and soar.  Whereas before
+she had been flung continually down to port, she now rolled as far to
+one side as to the other.
+
+I knew what had taken place.  Instead of remaining hove-to on the
+pampero, Captain West had turned tail and was running before it.
+This, I understood, meant a really serious storm, for the north-east
+was the last direction in which Captain West desired to go.  But at
+any rate the movement, though wilder, was easier, and I slept.  I was
+awakened at five by the thunder of seas that fell aboard, rushed down
+the main deck, and crashed against the cabin wall.  Through my open
+door I could see water swashing up and down the hall, while half a
+foot of water creamed and curdled from under my bunk across the floor
+each time the ship rolled to starboard.
+
+The steward brought me my coffee, and, wedged by boxes and pillows,
+like an equilibrist, I sat up and drank it.  Luckily I managed to
+finish it in time, for a succession of terrific rolls emptied one of
+my book-shelves.  Possum, crawling upward from my feet under the
+covered way of my bed, yapped with terror as the seas smashed and
+thundered and as the avalanche of books descended upon us.  And I
+could not but grin when the Paste Board Crown smote me on the head,
+while the puppy was knocked gasping with Chesterton's What's Wrong
+with the World?
+
+"Well, what do you think?" I queried of the steward who was helping
+to set us and the books to rights.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his bright slant eyes were very bright
+as he replied:
+
+"Many times I see like this.  Me old man.  Many times I see more bad.
+Too much wind, too much work.  Rotten dam bad."
+
+I could guess that the scene on deck was a spectacle, and at six
+o'clock, as gray light showed through my ports in the intervals when
+they were not submerged, I essayed the side-board of my bunk like a
+gymnast, captured my careering slippers, and shuddered as I thrust my
+bare feet into their chill sogginess.  I did not wait to dress.
+Merely in pyjamas I headed for the poop, Possum wailing dismally at
+my desertion.
+
+It was a feat to travel the narrow halls.  Time and again I paused
+and held on until my finger-tips hurt.  In the moments of easement I
+made progress.  Yet I miscalculated.  The foot of the broad stairway
+to the chart-house rested on a cross-hall a dozen feet in length.
+Over-confidence and an unusually violent antic of the Elsinore caused
+the disaster.  She flung down to starboard with such suddenness and
+at such a pitch that the flooring seemed to go out from under me and
+I hustled helplessly down the incline.  I missed a frantic clutch at
+the newel-post, flung up my arm in time to save my face, and, most
+fortunately, whirled half about, and, still falling, impacted with my
+shoulder muscle-pad on Captain West's door.
+
+Youth will have its way.  So will a ship in a sea.  And so will a
+hundred and seventy pounds of a man.  The beautiful hardwood door-
+panel splintered, the latch fetched away, and I broke the nails of
+the four fingers of my right hand in a futile grab at the flying
+door, marring the polished surface with four parallel scratches.  I
+kept right on, erupting into Captain West's spacious room with the
+big brass bed.
+
+Miss West, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown, her eyes heavy still
+with sleep, her hair glorious and for the once ungroomed, clinging in
+the doorway that gave entrance on the main cabin, met my startled
+gaze with an equally startled gaze.
+
+It was no time for apologies.  I kept right on my mad way, caught the
+foot stanchion, and was whipped around in half a circle flat upon
+Captain West's brass bed.
+
+Miss West was beginning to laugh.
+
+"Come right in," she gurgled.
+
+A score of retorts, all deliciously inadvisable, tickled my tongue,
+so I said nothing, contenting myself with holding on with my left
+hand while I nursed my stinging right hand under my arm-pit.  Beyond
+her, across the floor of the main cabin, I saw the steward in pursuit
+of Captain West's Bible and a sheaf of Miss West's music.  And as she
+gurgled and laughed at me, beholding her in this intimacy of storm,
+the thought flashed through my brain:
+
+SHE IS A WOMAN.  SHE IS DESIRABLE.
+
+Now did she sense this fleeting, unuttered flash of mine?  I know
+not, save that her laughter left her, and long conventional training
+asserted itself as she said:
+
+"I just knew everything was adrift in father's room.  He hasn't been
+in it all night.  I could hear things rolling around . . . What is
+wrong?  Are you hurt?"
+
+"Stubbed my fingers, that's all," I answered, looking at my broken
+nails and standing gingerly upright.
+
+"My, that WAS a roll," she sympathized.
+
+"Yes; I'd started to go upstairs," I said, "and not to turn into your
+father's bed.  I'm afraid I've ruined the door."
+
+Came another series of great rolls.  I sat down on the bed and held
+on.  Miss West, secure in the doorway, began gurgling again, while
+beyond, across the cabin carpet, the steward shot past, embracing a
+small writing-desk that had evidently carried away from its
+fastenings when he seized hold of it for support.  More seas smashed
+and crashed against the for'ard wall of the cabin; and the steward,
+failing of lodgment, shot back across the carpet, still holding the
+desk from harm.
+
+Taking advantage of favouring spells, I managed to effect my exit and
+gain the newel-post ere the next series of rolls came.  And as I
+clung on and waited, I could not forget what I had just seen.
+Vividly under my eyelids burned the picture of Miss West's sleep-
+laden eyes, her hair, and all the softness of her.  A WOMAN AND
+DESIRABLE kept drumming in my brain.
+
+But I forgot all this, when, nearly at the top, I was thrown up the
+hill of the stairs as if it had suddenly become downhill.  My feet
+flew from stair to stair to escape falling, and I flew, or fell,
+apparently upward, until, at the top, I hung on for dear life while
+the stern of the Elsinore flung skyward on some mighty surge.
+
+Such antics of so huge a ship!  The old stereotyped "toy" describes
+her; for toy she was, the sheerest splinter of a plaything in the
+grip of the elements.  And yet, despite this overwhelming sensation
+of microscopic helplessness, I was aware of a sense of surety.  There
+was the Samurai.  Informed with his will and wisdom, the Elsinore was
+no cat's-paw.  Everything was ordered, controlled.  She was doing
+what he ordained her to do, and, no matter what storm-Titans bellowed
+about her and buffeted her, she would continue to do what he ordained
+her to do.
+
+I glanced into the chart-room.  There he sat, leaned back in a screw-
+chair, his sea-booted legs, wedged against the settee, holding him in
+place in the most violent rolls.  His black oilskin coat glistened in
+the lamplight with a myriad drops of ocean that advertised a recent
+return from deck.  His sou'wester, black and glistening, was like the
+helmet of some legendary hero.  He was smoking a cigar, and he smiled
+and greeted me.  But he seemed very tired and very old--old with
+wisdom, however, not weakness.  The flesh of his face, the pink
+pigment quite washed and worn away, was more transparent than ever;
+and yet never was he more serene, never more the master absolute of
+our tiny, fragile world.  The age that showed in him was not a matter
+of terrestrial years.  It was ageless, passionless, beyond human.
+Never had he appeared so great to me, so far remote, so much a spirit
+visitant.
+
+And he cautioned and advised me, in silver-mellow beneficent voice,
+as I essayed the venture of opening the chart-house door to gain
+outside.  He knew the moment, although I never could have guessed it
+for myself, and gave the word that enabled me to win the poop.
+
+Water was everywhere.  The Elsinore was rushing through a blurring
+whirr of water.  Seas creamed and licked the poop-deck edge, now to
+starboard, now to port.  High in the air, over-towering and
+perilously down-toppling, following-seas pursued our stern.  The air
+was filled with spindrift like a fog or spray.  No officer of the
+watch was in sight.  The poop was deserted, save for two helmsmen in
+streaming oilskins under the half-shelter of the open wheel-house.  I
+nodded good morning to them.
+
+One was Tom Spink, the elderly but keen and dependable English
+sailor.  The other was Bill Quigley, one of a forecastle group of
+three that herded uniquely together, though the other two, Frank
+Fitzgibbon and Richard Oiler, were in the second mate's watch.  The
+three had proved handy with their fists, and clannish; they had
+fought pitched forecastle battles with the gangster clique and won a
+sort of neutrality of independence for themselves.  They were not
+exactly sailors--Mr. Mellaire sneeringly called them the
+"bricklayers"--but they had successfully refused subservience to the
+gangster crowd.
+
+To cross the deck from the chart-house to the break of the poop was
+no slight feat, but I managed it and hung on to the railing while the
+wind stung my flesh with the flappings of my pyjamas.  At this
+moment, and for the moment, the Elsinore righted to an even keel, and
+dashed along and down the avalanching face of a wave.  And as she
+thus righted her deck was filled with water level from rail to rail.
+Above this flood, or knee-deep in it, Mr. Pike and half-a-dozen
+sailors were bunched on the fife-rail of the mizzen-mast.  The
+carpenter, too, was there, with a couple of assistants.
+
+The next roll spilled half a thousand tons of water outboard sheer
+over the starboard-rail, while all the starboard ports opened
+automatically and gushed huge streams.  Then came the opposite roll
+to port, with a clanging shut of the iron doors; and a hundred tons
+of sea sloshed outboard across the port-rail, while all the iron
+doors on that side opened wide and gushed.  And all this time, it
+must not be forgotten, the Elsinore was dashing ahead through the
+sea.
+
+The only sail she carried was three upper-topsails.  Not the tiniest
+triangle of headsail was on her.  I had never seen her with so little
+wind-surface, and the three narrow strips of canvas, bellied to the
+seemingness of sheet-iron with the pressure of the wind, drove her
+before the gale at astonishing speed.
+
+As the water on the deck subsided the men on the fife-rail left their
+refuge.  One group, led by the redoubtable Mr. Pike, strove to
+capture a mass of planks and twisted steel.  For the moment I did not
+recognize what it was.  The carpenter, with two men, sprang upon
+Number Three hatch and worked hurriedly and fearfully.  And I knew
+why Captain West had turned tail to the storm.  Number Three hatch
+was a wreck.  Among other things the great timber, called the
+"strong-back," was broken.  He had had to run, or founder.  Before
+our decks were swept again I could make out the carpenter's emergency
+repairs.  With fresh timbers he was bolting, lashing, and wedging
+Number Three hatch into some sort of tightness.
+
+When the Elsinore dipped her port-rail under and scooped several
+hundred tons of South Atlantic, and then, immediately rolling her
+starboard-rail under, had another hundred tons of breaking sea fall
+in board upon her, all the men forsook everything and scrambled for
+life upon the fife-rail.  In the bursting spray they were quite
+hidden; and then I saw them and counted them all as they emerged into
+view.  Again they waited for the water to subside.
+
+The mass of wreckage pursued by Mr. Pike and his men ground a hundred
+feet along the deck for'ard, and, as the Elsinore's stern sank down
+in some abyss, ground back again and smashed up against the cabin
+wall.  I identified this stuff as part of the bridge.  That portion
+which spanned from the mizzen-mast to the 'midship-house was missing,
+while the starboard boat on the 'midship-house was a splintered mess.
+
+Watching the struggle to capture and subdue the section of bridge, I
+was reminded of Victor Hugo's splendid description of the sailor's
+battle with a ship's gun gone adrift in a night of storm.  But there
+was a difference, I found that Hugo's narrative had stirred me more
+profoundly than was I stirred by this actual struggle before my eyes.
+
+I have repeatedly said that the sea makes one hard.  I now realized
+how hard I had become as I stood there at the break of the poop in my
+wind-shipped, spray-soaked pyjamas.  I felt no solicitude for the
+forecastle humans who struggled in peril of their lives beneath me.
+They did not count.  Ah--I was even curious to see what might happen,
+did they get caught by those crashing avalanches of sea ere they
+could gain the safety of the fife-rail.
+
+And I saw.  Mr. Pike, in the lead, of course, up to his waist in
+rushing water, dashed in, caught the flying wreckage with a turn of
+rope, and fetched it up short with a turn around one of the port
+mizzen-shrouds.  The Elsinore flung down to port, and a solid wall of
+down-toppling green upreared a dozen feet above the rail.  The men
+fled to the fife-rail.  But Mr. Pike, holding his turn, held on,
+looked squarely into the wall of the wave, and received the downfall.
+He emerged, still holding by the turn the captured bridge.
+
+The feeble-minded faun (the stone-deaf man) led the way to Mr. Pike's
+assistance, followed by Tony, the suicidal Greek.  Paddy was next,
+and in order came Shorty, Henry the training-ship boy, and Nancy,
+last, of course, and looking as if he were going to execution.
+
+The deck-water was no more than knee-deep, though rushing with
+torrential force, when Mr. Pike and the six men lifted the section of
+bridge and started for'ard with it.  They swayed and staggered, but
+managed to keep going.
+
+The carpenter saw the impending ocean-mountain first.  I saw him cry
+to his own men and then to Mr. Pike ere he fled to the fife-rail.
+But Mr. Pike's men had no chance.  Abreast of the 'midship-house, on
+the starboard side, fully fifteen feet above the rail and twenty
+above the deck, the sea fell on board.  The top of the 'midship-house
+was swept clean of the splintered boat.  The water, impacting against
+the side of the house, spouted skyward as high as the crojack-yard.
+And all this, in addition to the main bulk of the wave, swept and
+descended upon Mr. Pike and his men.
+
+They disappeared.  The bridge disappeared.  The Elsinore rolled to
+port and dipped her deck full from rail to rail.  Next, she plunged
+down by the head, and all this mass of water surged forward.  Through
+the creaming, foaming surface now and then emerged an arm, or a head,
+or a back, while cruel edges of jagged plank and twisted steel rods
+advertised that the bridge was turning over and over.  I wondered
+what men were beneath it and what mauling they were receiving.
+
+And yet these men did not count.  I was aware of anxiety only for Mr.
+Pike.  He, in a way, socially, was of my caste and class.  He and I
+belonged aft in the high place; ate at the same table.  I was acutely
+desirous that he should not be hurt or killed.  The rest did not
+matter.  They were not of my world.  I imagine the old-time skippers,
+on the middle passage, felt much the same toward their slave-cargoes
+in the fetid 'tween decks.
+
+The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming
+valley.  Not a man had gained his feet.  Bridge and men swept back
+toward me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds.  And then that
+prodigious, incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two
+legs, upright, dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless
+forms of Nancy and the Faun.  My heart leapt at beholding this mighty
+figure of a man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang
+first into the teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and
+who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either hand.
+
+I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue,
+like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft
+with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and
+command.  I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe
+and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain.
+As for the rest--the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-
+pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs
+of long-conquered races--how could they count?  My heels were iron as
+I gazed on them in their peril and weakness.  Lord!  Lord!  For ten
+thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces
+and enslaved them to the toil of our will.
+
+Again the Elsinore rolled to starboard and to port, while the spume
+spouted to our lower-yards and a thousand tons of South Atlantic
+surged across from rail to rail.  And again all were down and under,
+with jagged plank and twisted steel overriding them.  And again that
+amazing blond-skinned giant emerged, on his two legs upstanding, a
+broken waif like a rat in either hand.  He forced his way through
+rushing, waist-high water, deposited his burdens with the carpenter
+on the fife-rail, and returned to drag Larry reeling to his feet and
+help him to the fife-rail.  Out of the wash, Tony, the Greek, crawled
+on hands and knees and sank down helplessly at the fife-rail.  There
+was nothing suicidal now in his mood.  Struggle as he would, he could
+not lift himself until the mate, gripping his oilskin at the collar,
+with one hand flung him through the air into the carpenter's arms.
+
+Next came Shorty, his face streaming blood, one arm hanging useless,
+his sea-boots stripped from him.  Mr. Pike pitched him into the fife-
+rail, and returned for the last man.  It was Henry, the training-ship
+boy.  Him I had seen, unstruggling, motionless, show at the surface
+like a drowned man and sink again as the flood surged aft and smashed
+him against the cabin.  Mr. Pike, shoulder-deep, twice beaten to his
+knees and under by bursting seas, caught the lad, shouldered him, and
+carried him away for'ard.
+
+An hour later, in the cabin, I encountered Mr. Pike going into
+breakfast.  He had changed his clothes, and he had shaved!  Now how
+could one treat a hero such as he save as I treated him when I
+remarked off-handedly that he must have had a lively watch?
+
+"My," he answered, equally off-handedly, "I did get a prime soaking."
+
+That was all.  He had had no time to see me at the poop-rail.  It was
+merely the day's work, the ship's work, the MAN'S work--all capitals,
+if you please, in MAN.  I was the only one aft who knew, and I knew
+because I had chanced to see.  Had I not been on the poop at that
+early hour no one aft ever would have known those gray, storm-morning
+deeds of his.
+
+"Anybody hurt?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, some of the men got wet.  But no bones broke.  Henry'll be laid
+off for a day.  He got turned over in a sea and bashed his head.  And
+Shorty's got a wrenched shoulder, I think.--But, say, we got Davis
+into the top bunk!  The seas filled him full and he had to climb for
+it.  He's all awash and wet now, and you oughta seen me praying for
+more."  He paused and sighed.  "I'm getting old, I guess.  I oughta
+wring his neck, but somehow I ain't got the gumption.  Just the same,
+he'll be overside before we get in."
+
+"A month's wages against a pound of tobacco he won't," I challenged.
+
+"No," said Mr. Pike slowly.  "But I'll tell you what I will do.  I'll
+bet you a pound of tobacco even, or a month's wages even, that I'll
+have the pleasure of putting a sack of coal to his feet that never
+will come off."
+
+"Done," said I.
+
+"Done," said Mr. Pike.  "And now I guess I'll get a bite to eat."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+
+The more I see of Miss West the more she pleases me.  Explain it in
+terms of propinquity, or isolation, or whatever you will; I, at
+least, do not attempt explanation.  I know only that she is a woman
+and desirable.  And I am rather proud, in a way, to find that I am
+just a man like any man.  The midnight oil, and the relentless
+pursuit I have endured in the past from the whole tribe of women,
+have not, I am glad to say, utterly spoiled me.
+
+I am obsessed by that phrase--a WOMAN AND DESIRABLE.  It beats in my
+brain, in my thought.  I go out of my way to steal a glimpse of Miss
+West through a cabin door or vista of hall when she does not know I
+am looking.  A woman is a wonderful thing.  A woman's hair is
+wonderful.  A woman's softness is a magic.--Oh, I know them for what
+they are, and yet this very knowledge makes them only the more
+wonderful.  I know--I would stake my soul--that Miss West has
+considered me as a mate a thousand times to once that I have so
+considered her.  And yet--she is a woman and desirable.
+
+And I find myself continually reminded of Richard Le Gallienne's
+inimitable quatrain:
+
+
+"Were I a woman, I would all day long
+Sing my own beauty in some holy song,
+Bend low before it, hushed and half afraid,
+And say 'I am a woman' all day long."
+
+
+Let me advise all philosophers suffering from world-sickness to take
+a long sea voyage with a woman like Miss West.
+
+In this narrative I shall call her "Miss West" no more.  She has
+ceased to be Miss West.  She is Margaret.  I do not think of her as
+Miss West.  I think of her as Margaret.  It is a pretty word, a
+woman-word.  What poet must have created it!  Margaret!  I never tire
+of it.  My tongue is enamoured of it.  Margaret West!  What a name to
+conjure with!  A name provocative of dreams and mighty connotations.
+The history of our westward-faring race is written in it.  There is
+pride in it, and dominion, and adventure, and conquest.  When I
+murmur it I see visions of lean, beaked ships, of winged helmets, and
+heels iron-shod of restless men, royal lovers, royal adventurers,
+royal fighters.  Yes, and even now, in these latter days when the sun
+consumes us, still we sit in the high seat of government and command.
+
+Oh--and by the way--she is twenty-four years old.  I asked Mr. Pike
+the date of the Dixie's collision with the river steamer in San
+Francisco Bay.  This occurred in 1901.  Margaret was twelve years old
+at the time.  This is 1913.  Blessings on the head of the man who
+invented arithmetic!  She is twenty-four.  Her name is Margaret, and
+she is desirable.
+
+
+There are so many things to tell about.  Where and how this mad
+voyage, with a mad crew, will end is beyond all surmise.  But the
+Elsinore drives on, and day by day her history is bloodily written.
+And while murder is done, and while the whole floating drama moves
+toward the bleak southern ocean and the icy blasts of Cape Horn, I
+sit in the high place with the masters, unafraid, I am proud to say,
+in an ecstasy, I am proud to say, and I murmur over and over to
+MYSELF--MARGARET, A WOMAN; MARGARET, AND DESIRABLE.
+
+But to resume.  It is the first day of June.  Ten days have passed
+since the pampero.  When the strong back on Number Three hatch was
+repaired Captain West came back on the wind, hove to, and rode out
+the gale.  Since then, in calm, and fog, and damp, and storm, we have
+won south until to-day we are almost abreast of the Falklands.  The
+coast of the Argentine lies to the West, below the sea-line, and some
+time this morning we crossed the fiftieth parallel of south latitude.
+Here begins the passage of Cape Horn, for so it is reckoned by the
+navigators--fifty south in the Atlantic to fifty south in the
+Pacific.
+
+And yet all is well with us in the matter of weather.  The Elsinore
+slides along with favouring winds.  Daily it grows colder.  The great
+cabin stove roars and is white-hot, and all the connecting doors are
+open, so that the whole after region of the ship is warm and
+comfortable.  But on the deck the air bites, and Margaret and I wear
+mittens as we promenade the poop or go for'ard along the repaired
+bridge to see the chickens on the 'midship-house.  The poor, wretched
+creatures of instinct and climate!  Behold, as they approach the
+southern mid-winter of the Horn, when they have need of all their
+feathers, they proceed to moult, because, forsooth, this is the
+summer time in the land they came from.  Or is moulting determined by
+the time of year they happen to be born?  I shall have to look into
+this.  Margaret will know.
+
+Yesterday ominous preparations were made for the passage of the Horn.
+All the braces were taken from the main deck pin-rails and geared and
+arranged so that they may be worked from the tops of the houses.
+
+Thus, the fore-braces run to the top of the forecastle, the main-
+braces to the top of the 'midship-house, and the mizzen-braces to the
+poop.  It is evident that they expect our main deck frequently to be
+filled with water.  So evident is it that a laden ship when in big
+seas is like a log awash, that fore and aft, on both sides, along the
+deck, shoulder-high, life-lines have been rigged.  Also, the two iron
+doors, on port and starboard, that open from the cabin directly upon
+the main deck, have been barricaded and caulked.  Not until we are in
+the Pacific and flying north will these doors open again.
+
+And while we prepare to battle around the stormiest headland in the
+world our situation on board grows darker.  This morning Petro
+Marinkovich, a sailor in Mr. Mellaire's watch, was found dead on
+Number One hatch.  The body bore several knife-wounds and the throat
+was cut.  It was palpably done by some one or several of the
+forecastle hands; but not a word can be elicited.  Those who are
+guilty of it are silent, of course; while others who may chance to
+know are afraid to speak.
+
+Before midday the body was overside with the customary sack of coal.
+Already the man is a past episode.  But the humans for'ard are tense
+with expectancy of what is to come.  I strolled for'ard this
+afternoon, and noted for the first time a distinct hostility toward
+me.  They recognize that I belong with the after-guard in the high
+place.  Oh, nothing was said; but it was patent by the way almost
+every man looked at me, or refused to look at me.  Only Mulligan
+Jacobs and Charles Davis were outspoken.
+
+"Good riddance," said Mulligan Jacobs.  "The Guinea didn't have the
+spunk of a louse.  And he's better off, ain't he?  He lived dirty,
+an' he died dirty, an' now he's over an' done with the whole dirty
+game.  There's men on board that oughta wish they was as lucky as
+him.  Theirs is still a-coming to 'em."
+
+"You mean . . . ?" I queried.
+
+"Whatever you want to think I mean," the twisted wretch grinned
+malevolently into my face.
+
+Charles Davis, when I peeped into his iron room, was exuberant.
+
+"A pretty tale for the court in Seattle," he exulted.  "It'll only
+make my case that much stronger.  And wait till the reporters get
+hold of it!  The hell-ship Elsinore!  They'll have pretty pickin's!"
+
+"I haven't seen any hell-ship," I said coldly.
+
+"You've seen my treatment, ain't you?" he retorted.  "You've seen the
+hell I've got, ain't you?"
+
+"I know you for a cold-blooded murderer," I answered.
+
+"The court will determine that, sir.  All you'll have to do is to
+testify to facts."
+
+"I'll testify that had I been in the mate's place I'd have hanged you
+for murder."
+
+His eyes positively sparkled.
+
+"I'll ask you to remember this conversation when you're under oath,
+sir," he cried eagerly.
+
+I confess the man aroused in me a reluctant admiration.  I looked
+about his mean, iron-walled room.  During the pampero the place had
+been awash.  The white paint was peeling off in huge scabs, and iron-
+rust was everywhere.  The floor was filthy.  The place stank with the
+stench of his sickness.  His pannikin and unwashed eating-gear from
+the last meal were scattered on the floor:  His blankets were wet,
+his clothing was wet.  In a corner was a heterogeneous mass of soggy,
+dirty garments.  He lay in the very bunk in which he had brained
+O'Sullivan.  He had been months in this vile hole.  In order to live
+he would have to remain months more in it.  And while his rat-like
+vitality won my admiration, I loathed and detested him in very
+nausea.
+
+"Aren't you afraid?" I demanded.  "What makes you think you will last
+the voyage?  Don't you know bets are being made that you won't?"
+
+So interested was he that he seemed to prick up his ears as he raised
+on his elbow.
+
+"I suppose you're too scared to tell me about them bets," he sneered.
+
+"Oh, I've bet you'll last," I assured him.
+
+"That means there's others that bet I won't," he rattled on hastily.
+"An' that means that there's men aboard the Elsinore right now
+financially interested in my taking-off."
+
+At this moment the steward, bound aft from the galley, paused in the
+doorway and listened, grinning.  As for Charles Davis, the man had
+missed his vocation.  He should have been a land-lawyer, not a sea-
+lawyer.
+
+"Very well, sir," he went on.  "I'll have you testify to that in
+Seattle, unless you're lying to a helpless sick man, or unless you'll
+perjure yourself under oath."
+
+He got what he was seeking, for he stung me to retort:
+
+"Oh, I'll testify.  Though I tell you candidly that I don't think
+I'll win my bet."
+
+"You loose 'm bet sure," the steward broke in, nodding his head.
+"That fellow him die damn soon."
+
+"Bet with'm, sir," David challenged me.  "It's a straight tip from
+me, an' a regular cinch."
+
+The whole situation was so gruesome and grotesque, and I had been
+swept into it so absurdly, that for the moment I did not know what to
+do or say.
+
+"It's good money," Davis urged.  "I ain't goin' to die.  Look here,
+steward, how much you want to bet?"
+
+"Five dollar, ten dollar, twenty dollar," the steward answered, with
+a shoulder-shrug that meant that the sum was immaterial.
+
+"Very well then, steward.  Mr. Pathurst covers your money, say for
+twenty.  Is it a go, sir?"
+
+"Why don't you bet with him yourself?" I demanded.
+
+"Sure I will, sir.  Here, you steward, I bet you twenty even I don't
+die."
+
+The steward shook his head.
+
+"I bet you twenty to ten," the sick man insisted.  "What's eatin'
+you, anyway?"
+
+"You live, me lose, me pay you," the steward explained.  "You die, I
+win, you dead; no pay me."
+
+Still grinning and shaking his head, he went his way.
+
+"Just the same, sir, it'll be rich testimony," David chuckled.  "An'
+can't you see the reporters eatin' it up?"
+
+The Asiatic clique in the cook's room has its suspicions about the
+death of Marinkovich, but will not voice them.  Beyond shakings of
+heads and dark mutterings, I can get nothing out of Wada or the
+steward.  When I talked with the sail-maker, he complained that his
+injured hand was hurting him and that he would be glad when he could
+get to the surgeons in Seattle.  As for the murder, when pressed by
+me, he gave me to understand that it was no affair of the Japanese or
+Chinese on board, and that he was a Japanese.
+
+But Louis, the Chinese half-caste with the Oxford accent, was more
+frank.  I caught him aft from the galley on a trip to the lazarette
+for provisions.
+
+"We are of a different race, sir, from these men," he said; "and our
+safest policy is to leave them alone.  We have talked it over, and we
+have nothing to say, sir, nothing whatever to say.  Consider my
+position.  I work for'ard in the galley; I am in constant contact
+with the sailors; I even sleep in their section of the ship; and I am
+one man against many.  The only other countryman I have on board is
+the steward, and he sleeps aft.  Your servant and the two sail-makers
+are Japanese.  They are only remotely kin to us, though we've agreed
+to stand together and apart from whatever happens."
+
+"There is Shorty," I said, remembering Mr. Pike's diagnosis of his
+mixed nationality.
+
+"But we do not recognize him, sir," Louis answered suavely.  "He is
+Portuguese; he is Malay; he is Japanese, true; but he is a mongrel,
+sir, a mongrel and a bastard.  Also, he is a fool.  And please, sir,
+remember that we are very few, and that our position compels us to
+neutrality."
+
+"But your outlook is gloomy," I persisted.  "How do you think it will
+end?"
+
+"We shall arrive in Seattle most probably, some of us.  But I can
+tell you this, sir:  I have lived a long life on the sea, but I have
+never seen a crew like this.  There are few sailors in it; there are
+bad men in it; and the rest are fools and worse.  You will notice I
+mention no names, sir; but there are men on board whom I do not care
+to antagonize.  I am just Louis, the cook.  I do my work to the best
+of my ability, and that is all, sir."
+
+"And will Charles Davis arrive in Seattle?" I asked, changing the
+topic in acknowledgment of his right to be reticent.
+
+"No, I do not think so, sir," he answered, although his eyes thanked
+me for my courtesy.  "The steward tells me you have bet that he will.
+I think, sir, it is a poor bet.  We are about to go around the Horn.
+I have been around it many times.  This is midwinter, and we are
+going from east to west.  Davis' room will be awash for weeks.  It
+will never be dry.  A strong healthy man confined in it could well
+die of the hardship.  And Davis is far from well.  In short, sir, I
+know his condition, and he is in a shocking state.  Surgeons might
+prolong his life, but here in a wind-jammer it is shortened very
+rapidly.  I have seen many men die at sea.  I know, sir.  Thank you,
+sir."
+
+And the Eurasian Chinese-Englishman bowed himself away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+
+Things are worse than I fancied.  Here are two episodes within the
+last seventy-two hours.  Mr. Mellaire, for instance, is going to
+pieces.  He cannot stand the strain of being on the same vessel with
+the man who has sworn to avenge Captain Somers's murder, especially
+when that man is the redoubtable Mr. Pike.
+
+For several days Margaret and I have been remarking the second mate's
+bloodshot eyes and pain-lined face and wondering if he were sick.
+And to-day the secret leaked out.  Wada does not like Mr. Mellaire,
+and this morning, when he brought me breakfast, I saw by the wicked,
+gleeful gleam in his almond eyes that he was spilling over with some
+fresh, delectable ship's gossip.
+
+For several days, I learned, he and the steward have been solving a
+cabin mystery.  A gallon can of wood alcohol, standing on a shelf in
+the after-room, had lost quite a portion of its contents.  They
+compared notes and then made of themselves a Sherlock Holmes and a
+Doctor Watson.  First, they gauged the daily diminution of alcohol.
+Next they gauged it several times daily, and learned that the
+diminution, whenever it occurred, was first apparent immediately
+after meal-time.  This focussed their attention on two suspects--the
+second mate and the carpenter, who alone sat in the after-room.  The
+rest was easy.  Whenever Mr. Mellaire arrived ahead of the carpenter
+more alcohol was missing.  When they arrived and departed together,
+the alcohol was undisturbed.  The carpenter was never alone in the
+room.  The syllogism was complete.  And now the steward stores the
+alcohol under his bunk.
+
+But wood alcohol is deadly poison.  What a constitution this man of
+fifty must have!  Small wonder his eyes have been bloodshot.  The
+great wonder is that the stuff did not destroy him.
+
+I have not whispered a word of this to Margaret; nor shall I whisper
+it.  I should like to put Mr. Pike on his guard; and yet I know that
+the revealing of Mr. Mellaire's identity would precipitate another
+killing.  And still we drive south, close-hauled on the wind, toward
+the inhospitable tip of the continent.  To-day we are south of a line
+drawn between the Straits of Magellan and the Falklands, and to-
+morrow, if the breeze holds, we shall pick up the coast of Tierra del
+Fuego close to the entrance of the Straits of Le Maire, through which
+Captain West intends to pass if the wind favours.
+
+The other episode occurred last night.  Mr. Pike says nothing, yet he
+knows the crew situation.  I have been watching some time now, ever
+since the death of Marinkovich; and I am certain that Mr. Pike never
+ventures on the main deck after dark.  Yet he holds his tongue,
+confides in no man, and plays out the bitter perilous game as a
+commonplace matter of course and all in the day's work.
+
+And now to the episode.  Shortly after the close of the second dog-
+watch last evening I went for'ard to the chickens on the 'midship-
+house on an errand for Margaret.  I was to make sure that the steward
+had carried out her orders.  The canvas covering to the big chicken
+coop had to be down, the ventilation insured, and the kerosene stove
+burning properly.  When I had proved to my satisfaction the
+dependableness of the steward, and just as I was on the verge of
+returning to the poop, I was drawn aside by the weird crying of
+penguins in the darkness and by the unmistakable noise of a whale
+blowing not far away.
+
+I had climbed around the end of the port boat, and was standing
+there, quite hidden in the darkness, when I heard the unmistakable
+age-lag step of the mate proceed along the bridge from the poop.  It
+was a dim starry night, and the Elsinore, in the calm ocean under the
+lee of Tierra del Fuego, was slipping gently and prettily through the
+water at an eight-knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike paused at the for'ard end of the housetop and stood in a
+listening attitude.  From the main deck below, near Number Two hatch,
+across the mumbling of various voices, I could recognize Kid Twist,
+Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine--the three gangsters.  But Steve
+Roberts, the cow-boy, was also there, as was Mr. Mellaire, both of
+whom belonged in the other watch and should have been turned in; for,
+at midnight, it would be their watch on deck.  Especially wrong was
+Mr. Mellaire's presence, holding social converse with members of the
+crew--a breach of ship ethics most grievous.
+
+I have always been cursed with curiosity.  Always have I wanted to
+know; and, on the Elsinore, I have already witnessed many a little
+scene that was a clean-cut dramatic gem.  So I did not discover
+myself, but lurked behind the boat.
+
+Five minutes passed.  Ten minutes passed.  The men still talked.  I
+was tantalized by the crying of the penguins, and by the whale,
+evidently playful, which came so close that it spouted and splashed a
+biscuit-toss away.  I saw Mr. Pike's head turn at the sound; he
+glanced squarely in my direction, but did not see me.  Then he
+returned to listening to the mumble of voices from beneath.
+
+Now whether Mulligan Jacobs just happened along, or whether he was
+deliberately scouting, I do not know.  I tell what occurred.  Up-and-
+down the side of the 'midship-house is a ladder.  And up this ladder
+Mulligan Jacobs climbed so noiselessly that I was not aware of his
+presence until I heard Mr. Pike snarl
+
+"What the hell you doin' here?"
+
+Then I saw Mulligan Jacobs in the gloom, within two yards of the
+mate.
+
+"What's it to you?" Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.  The voices below
+hushed.  I knew every man stood there tense and listening.  No; the
+philosophers have not yet explained Mulligan Jacobs.  There is
+something more to him than the last word has said in any book.  He
+stood there in the darkness, a fragile creature with curvature of the
+spine, facing alone the first mate, and he was not afraid.
+
+Mr. Pike cursed him with fearful, unrepeatable words, and again
+demanded what he was doing there.
+
+"I left me plug of tobacco here when I was coiling down last," said
+the little twisted man--no; he did not say it.  He spat it out like
+so much venom.
+
+"Get off of here, or I'll throw you off, you and your tobacco," raged
+the mate.
+
+Mulligan Jacobs lurched closer to Mr. Pike, and in the gloom and with
+the roll of the ship swayed in the other's face.
+
+"By God, Jacobs!" was all the mate could say.
+
+"You old stiff," was all the terrible little cripple could retort.
+
+Mr. Pike gripped him by the collar and swung him in the air.
+
+"Are you goin' down?--or am I goin' to throw you down?" the mate
+demanded.
+
+I cannot describe their manner of utterance.  It was that of wild
+beasts.
+
+"I ain't ate outa your hand yet, have I?" was the reply.
+
+Mr. Pike tried to say something, still holding the cripple suspended,
+but he could do no more than strangle in his impotence of rage.
+
+"You're an old stiff, an old stiff, an old stiff," Mulligan Jacobs
+chanted, equally incoherent and unimaginative with brutish fury.
+
+"Say it again and over you go," the mate managed to enunciate
+thickly.
+
+"You're an old stiff," gasped Mulligan Jacobs.  He was flung.  He
+soared through the air with the might of the fling, and even as he
+soared and fell through the darkness he reiterated:
+
+"Old stiff!  Old stiff !"
+
+He fell among the men on Number Two hatch, and there were confusion
+and movement below, and groans.
+
+Mr. Pike paced up and down the narrow house and gritted his teeth.
+Then he paused.  He leaned his arms on the bridge-rail, rested his
+head on his arms for a full minute, then groaned:
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."  That was all.  Then he went
+aft, slowly, dragging his feet along the bridge.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+
+The days grow gray.  The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at
+meridian, it is lower in the northern sky.  All the old stars have
+long since gone, and it would seem the sun is following them.  The
+world--the only world I know--has been left behind far there to the
+north, and the hill of the earth is between it and us.  This sad and
+solitary ocean, gray and cold, is the end of all things, the falling-
+off place where all things cease.  Only it grows colder, and grayer,
+and penguins cry in the night, and huge amphibians moan and slubber,
+and great albatrosses, gray with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel
+and veer.
+
+
+"Land ho!" was the cry yesterday morning.  I shivered as I gazed at
+this, the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago.  There was
+no sun, and the morning was damp and cold with a brisk wind that
+penetrated any garment.  The deck thermometer marked 30--two degrees
+below freezing-point; and now and then easy squalls of snow swept
+past.
+
+All of the land that was to be seen was snow.  Long, low chains of
+peaks, snow-covered, arose out of the ocean.  As we drew closer,
+there were no signs of life.  It was a sheer, savage, bleak, forsaken
+land.  By eleven, off the entrance of Le Maire Straits, the squalls
+ceased, the wind steadied, and the tide began to make through in the
+direction we desired to go.
+
+Captain West did not hesitate.  His orders to Mr. Pike were quick and
+tranquil.  The man at the wheel altered the course, while both
+watches sprang aloft to shake out royals and skysails.  And yet
+Captain West knew every inch of the risk he took in this graveyard of
+ships.
+
+When we entered the narrow strait, under full sail and gripped by a
+tremendous tide, the rugged headlands of Tierra del Fuego dashed by
+with dizzying swiftness.  Close we were to them, and close we were to
+the jagged coast of Staten Island on the opposite shore.  It was
+here, in a wild bight, between two black and precipitous walls of
+rock where even the snow could find no lodgment, that Captain West
+paused in a casual sweep of his glasses and gazed steadily at one
+place.  I picked the spot up with my own glasses and was aware of an
+instant chill as I saw the four masts of a great ship sticking out of
+the water.  Whatever craft it was, it was as large as the Elsinore,
+and it had been but recently wrecked.
+
+"One of the German nitrate ships," said Mr. Pike.  Captain West
+nodded, still studying the wreck, then said:
+
+"She looks quite deserted.  Just the same, Mr. Pike, send several of
+your best-sighted sailors aloft, and keep a good lookout yourself.
+There may be some survivors ashore trying to signal us."
+
+But we sailed on, and no signals were seen.  Mr. Pike was delighted
+with our good fortune.  He was guilty of walking up and down, rubbing
+his hands and chuckling to himself.  Not since 1888, he told me, had
+he been through the Straits of Le Maire.  Also, he said that he knew
+of shipmasters who had made forty voyages around the Horn and had
+never once had the luck to win through the straits.  The regular
+passage is far to the east around Staten Island, which means a loss
+of westing, and here, at the tip of the world, where the great west
+wind, unobstructed by any land, sweeps round and around the narrow
+girth of earth, westing is the thing that has to be fought for mile
+by mile and inch by inch.  The Sailing Directions advise masters on
+the Horn passage:  Make Westing.  WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE WESTING.
+
+When we emerged from the straits in the early afternoon the same
+steady breeze continued, and in the calm water under the lee of
+Tierra del Fuego, which extends south-westerly to the Horn, we
+slipped along at an eight-knot clip.
+
+Mr. Pike was beside himself.  He could scarcely tear himself from the
+deck when it was his watch below.  He chuckled, rubbed his hands, and
+incessantly hummed snatches from the Twelfth Mass.  Also, he was
+voluble.
+
+"To-morrow morning we'll be up with the Horn.  We'll shave it by a
+dozen or fifteen miles.  Think of it!  We'll just steal around!  I
+never had such luck, and never expected to.  Old girl Elsinore,
+you're rotten for'ard, but the hand of God is at your helm."
+
+Once, under the weather cloth, I came upon him talking to himself.
+It was more a prayer.
+
+"If only she don't pipe up," he kept repeating.  "If only she don't
+pipe up."
+
+Mr. Mellaire was quite different.
+
+"It never happens," he told me.  "No ship ever went around like this.
+You watch her come.  She always comes a-smoking out of the sou'west."
+
+"But can't a vessel ever steal around?" I asked.
+
+"The odds are mighty big against it, sir," he answered.  "I'll give
+you a line on them.  I'll wager even, sir, just a nominal bet of a
+pound of tobacco, that inside twenty-four hours we'll he hove to
+under upper-topsails.  I'll wager ten pounds to five that we're not
+west of the Horn a week from now; and, fifty to fifty being the
+passage, twenty pounds to five that two weeks from now we're not up
+with fifty in the Pacific."
+
+As for Captain West, the perils of Le Maire behind, he sat below, his
+slippered feet stretched before him, smoking a cigar.  He had nothing
+to say whatever, although Margaret and I were jubilant and dared
+duets through all of the second dog-watch.
+
+
+And this morning, in a smooth sea and gentle breeze, the Horn bore
+almost due north of us not more than six miles away.  Here we were,
+well abreast and reeling off westing.
+
+"What price tobacco this morning?" I quizzed Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"Going up," he came back.  "Wish I had a thousand bets like the one
+with you, sir."
+
+I glanced about at sea and sky and gauged the speed of our way by the
+foam, but failed to see anything that warranted his remark.  It was
+surely fine weather, and the steward, in token of the same, was
+trying to catch fluttering Cape pigeons with a bent pin on a piece of
+thread.
+
+For'ard, on the poop, I encountered Mr. Pike.  It WAS an encounter,
+for his salutation was a grunt.
+
+"Well, we're going right along," I ventured cheerily.
+
+He made no reply, but turned and stared into the gray south-west with
+an expression sourer than any I had ever seen on his face.  He
+mumbled something I failed to catch, and, on my asking him to repeat
+it, he said:
+
+"It's breeding weather.  Can't you see it?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"What d'ye think we're taking off the kites for?" he growled.
+
+I looked aloft.  The skysails were already furled; men were furling
+the royals; and the topgallant-yards were running down while
+clewlines and buntlines bagged the canvas.  Yet, if anything, our
+northerly breeze fanned even more gently.
+
+"Bless me if I can see any weather," I said.
+
+"Then go and take a look at the barometer," he grunted, as he turned
+on his heel and swung away from me.
+
+In the chart-room was Captain West, pulling on his long sea-boots.
+That would have told me had there been no barometer, though the
+barometer was eloquent enough of itself.  The night before it had
+stood at 30.10.  It was now 28.64.  Even in the pampero it had not
+been so low as that.
+
+"The usual Cape Horn programme," Captain West smiled to me, as he
+stood up in all his lean and slender gracefulness and reached for his
+long oilskin coat.
+
+Still I could scarcely believe.
+
+"Is it very far away?" I inquired.
+
+He shook his head, and forebore in the act of speaking to lift his
+hand for me to listen.  The Elsinore rolled uneasily, and from
+without came the soft and hollow thunder of sails emptying themselves
+against the masts and gear.
+
+We had chatted a bare five minutes, when again he lifted his head.
+This time the Elsinore heeled over slightly and remained heeled over,
+while the sighing whistle of a rising breeze awoke in the rigging.
+
+"It's beginning to make," he said, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of the
+sea.
+
+And then I heard Mr. Pike snarling out orders, and in my heart
+discovered a growing respect for Cape Horn--Cape Stiff, as the
+sailors call it.
+
+An hour later we were hove to on the port tack under upper-topsails
+and foresail.  The wind had come out of the south-west, and our
+leeway was setting us down upon the land.  Captain West gave orders
+to the mate to stand by to wear ship.  Both watches had been taking
+in sail, so that both watches were on deck for the manoeuvre.
+
+It was astounding, the big sea that had arisen in so short a time.
+The wind was blowing a gale that ever, in recurring gusts, increased
+upon itself.  Nothing was visible a hundred yards away.  The day had
+become black-gray.  In the cabin lamps were burning.  The view from
+the poop, along the length of the great labouring ship, was
+magnificent.  Seas burst and surged across her weather-rail and kept
+her deck half filled, despite the spouting ports and gushing
+scuppers.
+
+On each of the two houses and on the poop the ship's complement, all
+in oilskins, was in groups.  For'ard, Mr. Mellaire had charge.  Mr.
+Pike took charge of the 'midship-house and the poop.  Captain West
+strolled up and down, saw everything, said nothing; for it was the
+mate's affair.
+
+When Mr. Pike ordered the wheel hard up, he slacked off all the
+mizzen-yards, and followed it with a partial slacking of the main-
+yards, so that the after-pressures were eased.  The foresail and
+fore-lower- and-upper-topsails remained flat in order to pay the head
+off before the wind.  All this took time.  The men were slow, not
+strong, and without snap.  They reminded me of dull oxen by the way
+they moved and pulled.  And the gale, ever snorting harder, now
+snorted diabolically.  Only at intervals could I glimpse the group on
+top the for'ard-house.  Again and again, leaning to it and holding
+their heads down, the men on the 'midship-house were obliterated by
+the drive of crested seas that burst against the rail, spouted to the
+lower-yards, and swept in horizontal volumes across to leeward.  And
+Mr. Pike, like an enormous spider in a wind-tossed web, went back and
+forth along the slender bridge that was itself a shaken thread in the
+blast of the storm.
+
+So tremendous were the gusts that for the time the Elsinore refused
+to answer.  She lay down to it; she was swept and racked by it; but
+her head did not pay off before it, and all the while we drove down
+upon that bitter, iron coast.  And the world was black-gray, and
+violent, and very cold, with the flying spray freezing to ice in
+every lodgment.
+
+We waited.  The groups of men, head down to it, waited.  Mr. Pike,
+restless, angry, his blue eyes as bitter as the cold, his mouth as
+much a-snarl as the snarl of the elements with which he fought,
+waited.  The Samurai waited, tranquil, casual, remote.  And Cape Horn
+waited, there on our lee, for the bones of our ship and us.
+
+And then the Elsinore's bow paid off.  The angle of the beat of the
+gale changed, and soon, with dreadful speed, we were dashing straight
+before it and straight toward the rocks we could not see.  But all
+doubt was over.  The success of the manoeuvre was assured.  Mr.
+Mellaire, informed by messenger along the bridge from Mr. Pike,
+slacked off the head-yards.  Mr. Pike, his eye on the helmsman, his
+hand signalling the order, had the wheel put over to port to check
+the Elsinore's rush into the wind as she came up on the starboard
+tack.  All was activity.  Main- and mizzen-yards were braced up, and
+the Elsinore, snugged down and hove to, had a lee of thousands of
+miles of Southern Ocean.
+
+And all this had been accomplished in the stamping ground of storm,
+at the end of the world, by a handful of wretched weaklings, under
+the drive of two strong mates, with behind them the placid will of
+the Samurai.
+
+It had taken thirty minutes to wear ship, and I had learned how the
+best of shipmasters can lose their ships without reproach.  Suppose
+the Elsinore had persisted in her refusal to payoff?  Suppose
+anything had carried away?  And right here enters Mr. Pike.  It is
+his task ever to see that every rope and block and all the myriad
+other things in the vast and complicated gear of the Elsinore are in
+strength not to carry away.  Always have the masters of our race
+required henchmen like Mr. Pike, and it seems the race has well
+supplied those henchmen.
+
+Ere I went below I heard Captain West tell Mr. Pike that while both
+watches were on deck it would be just as well to put a reef in the
+foresail before they furled it.  The mainsail and the crojack being
+off, I could see the men black on the fore-yard.  For half-an-hour I
+lingered, watching them.  They seemed to make no progress with the
+reef.  Mr. Mellaire was with them, having direct supervision of the
+job, while Mr. Pike, on the poop, growled and grumbled and spat
+endless blasphemies into the flying air.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Two watches on a single yardarm and unable to put a reef in a
+handkerchief like that!" he snorted.  "What'll it be if we're off
+here a month?"
+
+"A month!" I cried.
+
+"A month isn't anything for Cape Stiff," he said grimly.  "I've been
+off here seven weeks and then turned tail and run around the other
+way."
+
+"Around the world?" I gasped.
+
+"It was the only way to get to 'Frisco," he answered.  "The Horn's
+the Horn, and there's no summer seas that I've ever noticed in this
+neighbourhood."
+
+My fingers were numb and I was chilled through when I took a last
+look at the wretched men on the fore-yard and went below to warm up.
+
+A little later, as I went in to table, through a cabin port I stole a
+look for'ard between seas and saw the men still struggling on the
+freezing yard.
+
+The four of us were at table, and it was very comfortable, in spite
+of the Elsinore's violent antics.  The room was warm.  The storm-
+racks on the table kept each dish in its place.  The steward served
+and moved about with ease and apparent unconcern, although I noticed
+an occasional anxious gleam in his eyes when he poised some dish at a
+moment when the ship pitched and flung with unusual wildness.
+
+And now and again I thought of the poor devils on the yard.  Well,
+they belonged there by right, just as we belonged here by right in
+this oasis of the cabin.  I looked at Mr. Pike and wagered to myself
+that half-a-dozen like him could master that stubborn foresail.  As
+for the Samurai, I was convinced that alone, not moving from his
+seat, by a tranquil exertion of will, he could accomplish the same
+thing.
+
+The lighted sea-lamps swung and leaped in their gimbals, ever
+battling with the dancing shadows in the murky gray.  The wood-work
+creaked and groaned.  The jiggermast, a huge cylinder of hollow steel
+that perforated the apartment through deck above and floor beneath,
+was hideously vocal with the storm.  Far above, taut ropes beat
+against it so that it clanged like a boiler-shop.  There was a
+perpetual thunder of seas falling on our deck and crash of water
+against our for'ard wall; while the ten thousand ropes and gears
+aloft bellowed and screamed as the storm smote them.
+
+And yet all this was from without.  Here, at this well-appointed
+table, was no draught nor breath of wind, no drive of spray nor wash
+of sea.  We were in the heart of peace in the midmost centre of the
+storm.  Margaret was in high spirits, and her laughter vied with the
+clang of the jiggermast.  Mr. Pike was gloomy, but I knew him well
+enough to attribute his gloom, not to the elements, but to the
+inefficients futilely freezing on the yard.  As for me, I looked
+about at the four of us--blue-eyed, gray-eyed, all fair-skinned and
+royal blond--and somehow it seemed that I had long since lived this,
+and that with me and in me were all my ancestors, and that their
+lives and memories were mine, and that all this vexation of the sea
+and air and labouring ship was of old time and a thousand times
+before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+
+"How are you for a climb?" Margaret asked me, shortly after we had
+left the table.
+
+She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou'wester, and
+sea-boots.
+
+"I've never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed," she
+went on.  "Have you a good head?"
+
+I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged,
+and clapped my hands for Wada.
+
+"Will you?" she cried eagerly.
+
+"If you let me lead," I answered airily, "and if you will promise to
+hold on tight.  Whither away?"
+
+"Into the top of the jigger.  It's the easiest.  As for holding on,
+please remember that I have often done it.  It is with you the doubt
+rests."
+
+"Very well," I retorted; "do you lead then.  I shall hold on tight."
+
+"I have seen many a landsman funk it," she teased.  "There are no
+lubber-holes in our tops."
+
+"And most likely I shall," I agreed.  "I've never been aloft in my
+life, and since there is no hole for a lubber."
+
+She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I
+extended my arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
+
+On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre.  The
+universe was very immediately about us.  It blanketed us in storming
+wind and flying spray and grayness.  Our main deck was impassable,
+and the relief of the wheel came aft along the bridge.  It was two
+o'clock, and for over two hours the frozen wretches had laid out upon
+the fore-yard.  They were still there, weak, feeble, hopeless.
+Captain West, stepping out in the lee of the chart-house, gazed at
+them for several minutes.
+
+"We'll have to give up that reef," he said to Mr. Pike.  "Just make
+the sail fast.  Better put on double gaskets."
+
+And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as
+spray and the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for'ard
+along the bridge to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-
+masted ship that could not reef a foresail.
+
+It is true.  They could not do it, despite their willingness, for
+this I have learned:  THE MEN DO THEIR WEAK BEST WHENEVER THE ORDER
+IS GIVEN TO SHORTEN SAIL.  It must be that they are afraid.  They
+lack the iron of Mr. Pike, the wisdom and the iron of Captain West.
+Always, have I noticed, with all the alacrity of which they are
+capable, do they respond to any order to shorten down.  That is why
+they are for'ard, in that pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack
+the iron.  Well, I can say only this:  If nothing else could have
+prevented the funk hinted at by Margaret, the sorry spectacle of
+these ironless, spineless creatures was sufficient safeguard.  How
+could I funk in the face of their weakness--I, who lived aft in the
+high place?
+
+Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the
+pin-rail at the foot of the weather jigger-rigging.  But it was
+merely the recognition of a courtesy on her part, for the next moment
+she released her mittened hand from mine, swung boldly outboard into
+the face of the gale, and around against the ratlines.  Then she
+began to climb.  I followed, almost unaware of the ticklishness of
+the exploit to a tyro, so buoyed up was I by her example and by my
+scorn of the weaklings for'ard.  Where men could go, I could go.
+What men could do, I could do.  And no daughter of the Samurai could
+out-game me.
+
+Yet it was slow work.  In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts
+one was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging.  At
+such times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor
+foot.  Also, there was no need for holding on.  As I have said, one
+was pinned against the rigging by the wind.
+
+Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me,
+until a fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the
+sea, in which case the result would be frigid drowning.  And still
+Margaret climbed.  Without pause she went out under the overhanging
+platform of the top, shifted her holds to the rigging that went aloft
+from it, and swung around this rigging, easily, carelessly, timing
+the action to the roll, and stood safely upon the top.
+
+I followed.  I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my
+back to the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my
+hands for holds I could not see.  I was in an ecstasy.  I could dare
+anything.  Had she sprung into the air, stretched out her arms, and
+soared away on the breast of the gale, I should have unhesitatingly
+followed her.
+
+As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view,
+I could see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes.  And as I
+swung around the rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in
+her eyes that was quickly routed by petulance.
+
+"Oh, you've done this sort of thing before," she reproached, calling
+loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
+
+I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again.  She
+nodded and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-
+swirled space from the edge of the top.  I sat beside her, looking
+down into the snow that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth
+out of which we had climbed.
+
+We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air
+on a steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into
+snow.  We had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had
+ceased to be.  But no.  Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless
+wings, driving fully eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge
+albatross.  He must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.
+He had seen his danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on the
+blast, he carelessly veered clear of collision.  His head and neck
+were rimed with age or frost--we could not tell which--and his bright
+bead-eye noted us as he passed and whirled away on a great circle
+into the snow to leeward.
+
+Margaret's hand shot out to mine.
+
+"It alone was worth the climb!" she cried.  And then the Elsinore
+flung down, and Margaret's hand clutched tighter for holding, while
+from the hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west
+wind drift upon our decks.
+
+Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
+quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
+beneath us--the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-
+head buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life
+back on top the for'ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-
+drive of ocean, and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr.
+Mellaire, with a handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the
+tiller.  And we saw the Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house,
+swaying with casual surety on the mad deck, as he spoke what must
+have been instructions to Mr. Pike.
+
+The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
+hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea.  Shaggy
+gray-beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the
+windward murky gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the
+Elsinore, one moment overtoppling her slender frailness, the next
+moment splashing a hundred tons of water on her deck and flinging her
+skyward as they passed beneath and foamed and crested from sight in
+the murky gray to leeward.  And the great albatrosses veered and
+circled about us, beating up into the bitter violence of the gale and
+sweeping grandly away before it far faster than it blew.
+
+Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent,
+questioning eyes.  With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew
+aside the ear-flap of her sou'wester and shouted:
+
+"It is nothing new.  I have been here before.  In the lives of all my
+fathers have I been here.  The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites
+my nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening.
+I know, now, that my forbears were Vikings.  I was seed of them in
+their own day.  With them I have raided English coasts, dared the
+Pillars of Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high
+place of government over the soft sun-warm peoples.  I am Hengist and
+Horsa; I am of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them.  I have
+bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever
+the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer
+gore, slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of
+my prowess on the walls of deep-buried caves--ay, and suckled she-
+wolves side by side with my brother-cubs, the scars of whose fangs
+are now upon me."
+
+She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
+cheeks, and the Elsinore flung over and down as if she would never
+rise again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying
+arc.  Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my
+ear-flap.
+
+"I don't know anything about it," she cried.  "It sounds like poetry.
+But I believe it.  It has to be, for it has been.  I have heard it
+aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back
+the frost and night."
+
+"And the books?" she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.
+
+"They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools
+that wrote them," I replied.
+
+Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as
+she swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she
+caught footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out
+of my sight under the perilous overhang of the top.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+
+"What price tobacco?" was Mr. Mellaire's greeting, when I came on
+deck this morning, bruised and weary, aching in every bone and muscle
+from sixty hours of being tossed about.
+
+The wind had fallen to a dead calm toward morning, and the Elsinore,
+her several spread sails booming and slatting, rolled more miserably
+than ever.  Mr. Mellaire pointed for'ard of our starboard beam.  I
+could make out a bleak land of white and jagged peaks.
+
+"Staten Island, the easterly end of it," said Mr. Mellaire.
+
+And I knew that we were in the position of a vessel just rounding
+Staten Island preliminary to bucking the Horn.  And, yet, four days
+ago, we had run through the Straits of Le Maire and stolen along
+toward the Horn.  Three days ago we had been well abreast of the Horn
+and even a few miles past.  And here we were now, starting all over
+again and far in the rear of where we had originally started.
+
+
+The condition of the men is truly wretched.  During the gale the
+forecastle was washed out twice.  This means that everything in it
+was afloat and that every article of clothing, including mattresses
+and blankets, is wet and will remain wet in this bitter weather until
+we are around the Horn and well up in the good-weather latitudes.
+The same is true of the 'midship-house.  Every room in it, with the
+exception of the cook's and the sail-makers' (which open for'ard on
+Number Two hatch), is soaking.  And they have no fires in their rooms
+with which to dry things out.
+
+I peeped into Charles Davis's room.  It was terrible.  He grinned to
+me and nodded his head.
+
+"It's just as well O'Sullivan wasn't here, sir," he said.  "He'd a-
+drowned in the lower bunk.  And I want to tell you I was doing some
+swimmin' before I could get into the top one.  And salt water's bad
+for my sores.  I oughtn't to be in a hole like this in Cape Horn
+weather.  Look at the ice, there, on the floor.  It's below freezin'
+right now in this room, and my blankets are wet, and I'm a sick man,
+as any man can tell that's got a nose."
+
+"If you'd been decent to the mate you might have got decent treatment
+in return," I said.
+
+"Huh!" he sneered.  "You needn't think you can lose me, sir.  I can
+grow fat on this sort of stuff.  Why, sir, when I think of the court
+doin's in Seattle I just couldn't die.  An' if you'll listen to me,
+sir, you'll cover the steward's money.  You can't lose.  I'm advisin'
+you, sir, because you're a sort of decent sort.  Anybody that bets on
+my going over the side is a sure loser."
+
+"How could you dare ship on a voyage like this in your condition?" I
+demanded.
+
+"Condition?" he queried with a fine assumption of innocence.  "Why,
+that is why I did ship.  I was in tiptop shape when I sailed.  All
+this come out on me afterward.  You remember seem' me aloft, an' up
+to my neck in water.  And I trimmed coal below, too.  A sick man
+couldn't do it.  And remember, sir, you'll have to testify to how I
+did my duty at the beginning before I took down."
+
+"I'll bet with you myself if you think I'm goin' to die," he called
+after me.
+
+Already the sailors show marks of the hardship they are enduring.  It
+is surprising, in so short a time, how lean their faces have grown,
+how lined and seamed.  They must dry their underclothing with their
+body heat.  Their outer garments, under their oilskins, are soggy.
+And yet, paradoxically, despite their lean, drawn faces, they have
+grown very stout.  Their walk is a waddle, and they bulge with
+seaming corpulency.  This is due to the amount of clothing they have
+on.  I noticed Larry, to-day, had on two vests, two coats, and an
+overcoat, with his oilskin outside of that.  They are elephantine in
+their gait for, in addition to everything else, they have wrapped
+their feet, outside their sea-boots, with gunny sacking.
+
+It IS cold, although the deck thermometer stood at thirty-three to-
+day at noon.  I had Wada weigh the clothing I wear on deck.  Omitting
+oilskins and boots, it came to eighteen pounds.  And yet I am not any
+too warm in all this gear when the wind is blowing.  How sailors,
+after having once experienced the Horn, can ever sign on again for a
+voyage around is beyond me.  It but serves to show how stupid they
+must be.
+
+I feel sorry for Henry, the training-ship boy.  He is more my own
+kind, and some day he will make a henchman of the afterguard and a
+mate like Mr. Pike.  In the meantime, along with Buckwheat, the other
+boy who berths in the 'midship-house with him, he suffers the same
+hardship as the men.  He is very fair-skinned, and I noticed this
+afternoon, when he was pulling on a brace, that the sleeves of his
+oil-skins, assisted by the salt water, have chafed his wrists till
+they are raw and bleeding and breaking out in sea-boils.  Mr.
+Mellaire tells me that in another week there will be a plague of
+these boils with all hands for'ard.
+
+"When do you think we'll be up with the Horn again?" I innocently
+queried of Mr. Pike.
+
+He turned upon me in a rage, as if I had insulted him, and positively
+snarled in my face ere he swung away without the courtesy of an
+answer.  It is evident that he takes the sea seriously.  That is why,
+I fancy, he is so excellent a seaman.
+
+
+The days pass--if the interval of sombre gray that comes between the
+darknesses can be called day.  For a week, now, we have not seen the
+sun.  Our ship's position in this waste of storm and sea is
+conjectural.  Once, by dead reckoning, we gained up with the Horn and
+a hundred miles south of it.  And then came another sou'west gale
+that tore our f ore-topsail and brand new spencer out of the belt-
+ropes and swept us away to a conjectured longitude east of Staten
+Island.
+
+Oh, I know now this Great West Wind that blows for ever around the
+world south of 55.  And I know why the chart-makers have capitalized
+it, as, for instance, when I read "The Great West Wind Drift."  And I
+know why the Sailing Directions advise:  "WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE
+WESTING! MAKE WESTING!"
+
+And the West Wind and the drift of the West Wind will not permit the
+Elsinore to make westing.  Gale follows gale, always from the west,
+and we make easting.  And it is bitter cold, and each gale snorts up
+with a prelude of driving snow.
+
+In the cabin the lamps burn all day long.  No more does Mr. Pike run
+the phonograph, nor does Margaret ever touch the piano.  She
+complains of being bruised and sore.  I have a wrenched shoulder from
+being hurled against the wall.  And both Wada and the steward are
+limping.  Really, the only comfort I can find is in my bunk, so
+wedged with boxes and pillows that the wildest rolls cannot throw me
+out.  There, save for my meals and for an occasional run on deck for
+exercise and fresh air, I lie and read eighteen and nineteen hours
+out of the twenty-four.  But the unending physical strain is very
+wearisome.
+
+How it must be with the poor devils for'ard is beyond conceiving.
+The forecastle has been washed out several times, and everything is
+soaking wet.  Besides, they have grown weaker, and two watches are
+required to do what one ordinary watch could do.  Thus, they must
+spend as many hours on the sea-swept deck and aloft on the freezing
+yards as I do in my warm, dry bunk.  Wada tells me that they never
+undress, but turn into their wet bunks in their oil-skins and sea-
+boots and wet undergarments.
+
+To look at them crawling about on deck or in the rigging is enough.
+They are truly weak.  They are gaunt-cheeked and haggard-gray of
+skin, with great dark circles under their eyes.  The predicted plague
+of sea-boils and sea-cuts has come, and their hands and wrists and
+arms are frightfully afflicted.  Now one, and now another, and
+sometimes several, either from being knocked down by seas or from
+general miserableness, take to the bunk for a day or so off.  This
+means more work for the others, so that the men on their feet are not
+tolerant of the sick ones, and a man must be very sick to escape
+being dragged out to work by his mates.
+
+I cannot but marvel at Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs.  Old and fragile
+as they are, it seems impossible that they can endure what they do.
+For that matter, I cannot understand why they work at all.  I cannot
+understand why any of them toil on and obey an order in this freezing
+hell of the Horn.  Is it because of fear of death that they do not
+cease work and bring death to all of us?  Or is it because they are
+slave-beasts, with a slave-psychology, so used all their lives to
+being driven by their masters that it is beyond their mental power to
+refuse to obey?
+
+And yet most of them, in a week after we reach Seattle, will be on
+board other ships outward bound for the Horn.  Margaret says the
+reason for this is that sailors forget.  Mr. Pike agrees.  He says
+give them a week in the south-east trades as we run up the Pacific
+and they will have forgotten that they have ever been around the
+Horn.  I wonder.  Can they be as stupid as this?  Does pain leave no
+record with them?  Do they fear only the immediate thing?  Have they
+no horizons wider than a day?  Then indeed do they belong where they
+are.
+
+They ARE cowardly.  This was shown conclusively this morning at two
+o'clock.  Never have I witnessed such panic fear, and it was fear of
+the immediate thing--fear, stupid and beast-like.  It was Mr.
+Mellaire's watch.  As luck would have it, I was reading Boas's Mind
+of Primitive Man when I heard the rush of feet over my head.  The
+Elsinore was hove to on the port tack at the time, under very short
+canvas.  I was wondering what emergency had brought the watch upon
+the poop, when I heard another rush of feet that meant the second
+watch.  I heard no pulling and hauling, and the thought of mutiny
+flashed across my mind.
+
+Still nothing happened, and, growing curious, I got into my sea-
+boots, sheepskin coat, and oilskin, put on my sou'wester and mittens,
+and went on deck.  Mr. Pike had already dressed and was ahead of me.
+Captain West, who in this bad weather sleeps in the chart-room, stood
+in the lee doorway of the house, through which the lamplight streamed
+on the frightened faces of the men.
+
+Those of the 'midship-house were not present, but every man Jack of
+the forecastle, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs,
+as I afterwards learned, had joined in the flight aft.  Andy Fay, who
+belonged in the watch below, had calmly remained in his bunk, while
+Mulligan Jacobs had taken advantage of the opportunity to sneak into
+the forecastle and fill his pipe.
+
+"What is the matter, Mr. Pike?" Captain West asked.
+
+Before the mate could reply, Bert Rhine snickered:
+
+"The devil's come aboard, sir."
+
+But his snicker was palpably an assumption of unconcern he did not
+possess.  The more I think over it the more I am surprised that such
+keen men as the gangsters should have been frightened by what had
+occurred.  But frightened they were, the three of them, out of their
+bunks and out of the precious surcease of their brief watch below.
+
+So fear-struck was Larry that he chattered and grimaced like an ape,
+and shouldered and struggled to get away from the dark and into the
+safety of the shaft of light that shone out of the chart-house.
+Tony, the Greek, was just as bad, mumbling to himself and continually
+crossing himself.  He was joined in this, as a sort of chorus, by the
+two Italians, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani.  Arthur Deacon was
+almost in collapse, and he and Chantz, the Jew, shamelessly clung to
+each other for support.  Bob, the fat and overgrown youth, was
+sobbing, while the other youth, Bony the Splinter, was shivering and
+chattering his teeth.  Yes, and the two best sailors for'ard, Tom
+Spink and the Maltese Cockney, stood in the background, their backs
+to the dark, their faces yearning toward the light.
+
+More than all other contemptible things in this world there are two
+that I loathe and despise:  hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice
+in a man.  The first turns me to ice.  I cannot sympathize with
+hysteria.  The second turns my stomach.  Cowardice in a man is to me
+positively nauseous.  And this fear-smitten mass of human animals on
+our reeling poop raised my gorge.  Truly, had I been a god at that
+moment, I should have annihilated the whole mass of them.  No; I
+should have been merciful to one.  He was the Faun.  His bright,
+pain-liquid, and flashing-eager eyes strained from face to face with
+desire to understand.  He did not know what had occurred, and, being
+stone-deaf, had thought the rush aft a response to a call for all
+hands.
+
+I noticed Mr. Mellaire.  He may be afraid of Mr. Pike, and he is a
+murderer; but at any rate he has no fear of the supernatural.  With
+two men above him in authority, although it was his watch, there was
+no call for him to do anything.  He swayed back and forth in balance
+to the violent motions of the Elsinore and looked on with eyes that
+were amused and cynical.
+
+"What does the devil look like, my man?" Captain West asked.
+
+Bert Rhine grinned sheepishly.
+
+"Answer the captain!" Mr. Pike snarled at him.
+
+Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster's eyes
+for the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl.  Then he replied to
+Captain West:
+
+"I didn't wait to see, sir.  But it's one whale of a devil."
+
+"He's as big as a elephant, sir," volunteered Bill Quigley.  "I
+seen'm face to face, sir.  He almost got me when I run out of the
+fo'c's'le."
+
+"Oh, Lord, sir!" Larry moaned.  "The way he hit the house, sir.  It
+was the call to Judgment."
+
+"Your theology is mixed, my man," Captain West smiled quietly, though
+I could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his
+wonderful Samurai eyes.
+
+He turned to the mate.
+
+"Mr. Pike, will you please go for'ard and interview this devil?
+Fasten him up and tie him down and I'll take a look at him in the
+morning."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr. Pike; and Kipling's line came to me:
+
+
+"Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?"
+
+
+And as I went for'ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and
+Mr. Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge--not a
+sailor dared to accompany us--other lines of "The Galley Slave"
+drifted through my brain, such as:
+
+
+"Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold
+-
+We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . "
+
+
+And:
+
+
+"By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel,
+By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . .
+. "
+
+
+And:
+
+
+"Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone
+by . . . "
+
+
+And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of
+the race, and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful
+henchman, the able sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and
+galled, the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea.
+I know him now.  He can never again offend me.  I forgive him
+everything--the whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at
+Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his
+savagery to the men, his snarl and his sneer.
+
+On top the 'midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to
+recall.  I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin
+about my neck, so that I was wet to the skin.  We crossed the next
+span of bridge through driving spray, and were well upon the top of
+the for'ard-house when something adrift on the deck hit the for'ard
+wall a terrific smash.
+
+"Whatever it is, it's playing the devil," Mr. Pike yelled in my ear,
+as he endeavoured to locate the thing by the dry-battery light-stick
+which he carried.
+
+The pencil of light travelled over dark water, white with foam, that
+churned upon the deck.
+
+"There it goes!" Mr. Pike cried, as the Elsinore dipped by the head
+and hurtled the water for'ard.
+
+The light went out as the three of us caught holds and crouched to a
+deluge of water from overside.  As we emerged, from under the
+forecastle-head we heard a tremendous thumping and battering.  Then,
+as the bow lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that
+immediately lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object that bounded
+down the inclined deck where no water was.  What became of it we
+could not see.
+
+Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire.  Again, as
+the Elsinore dipped by the head and fetched a surge of sea-water from
+aft along the runway, I saw the dark object bound for'ard directly at
+the mates.  They sprang to safety from its charge, the light went
+out, while another icy sea broke aboard.
+
+For a time I could see nothing of the two men.  Next, in the light
+flashed from the stick, I guessed that Mr. Pike was in pursuit of the
+thing.  He evidently must have captured it at the rail against the
+starboard rigging and caught a turn around it with a loose end of
+rope.  As the vessel rolled to windward some sort of a struggle
+seemed to be going on.  The second mate sprang to the mate's
+assistance, and, together, with more loose ends, they seemed to
+subdue the thing.
+
+I descended to see.  By the light-stick we made it out to be a large,
+barnacle-crusted cask.
+
+"She's been afloat for forty years," was Mr. Pike's judgment.  "Look
+at the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers."
+
+"And it's full of something," said Mr. Mellaire.  "Hope it isn't
+water."
+
+I rashly lent a hand when they started to work the cask for'ard,
+between seas and taking advantage of the rolls and pitches, to the
+shelter under the forecastle-head.  As a result, even through my
+mittens, I was cut by the sharp edges of broken shell.
+
+"It's liquor of some sort," said the mate, "but we won't risk
+broaching it till morning."
+
+"But where did it come from?" I asked.
+
+"Over the side's the only place it could have come from."  Mr. Pike
+played the light over it.  "Look at it!  It's been afloat for years
+and years."
+
+"The stuff ought to be well-seasoned," commented Mr. Mellaire.
+
+Leaving them to lash the cask securely, I stole along the deck to the
+forecastle and peered in.  The men, in their headlong flight, had
+neglected to close the doors, and the place was afloat.  In the
+flickering light from a small and very smoky sea-lamp it was a dismal
+picture.  No self-respecting cave-man, I am sure, would have lived in
+such a hole.
+
+Even as I looked a bursting sea filled the runway between the house
+and rail, and through the doorway in which I stood the freezing water
+rushed waist-deep.  I had to hold on to escape being swept inside the
+room.  From a top bunk, lying on his side, Andy Fay regarded me
+steadily with his bitter blue eyes.  Seated on the rough table of
+heavy planks, his sea-booted feet swinging in the water, Mulligan
+Jacobs pulled at his pipe.  When he observed me he pointed to pulpy
+book-pages that floated about.
+
+"Me library's gone to hell," he mourned as he indicated the flotsam.
+"There's me Byron.  An' there goes Zola an' Browning with a piece of
+Shakespeare runnin' neck an' neck, an' what's left of Anti-Christ
+makin' a bad last.  An' there's Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl
+you can't tell 'em apart."
+
+Here the Elsinore lay down to starboard, and the water in the
+forecastle poured out against my legs and hips.  My wet mittens
+slipped on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the
+scuppers, where I was turned over and over by another flood that had
+just boarded from windward.
+
+I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal
+of salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and
+climbed to the top of the house.  On my way aft along the bridge I
+encountered the crew coming for'ard.  Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were
+talking in the lee of the chart-house, and inside, as I passed below,
+Captain West was smoking a cigar.
+
+After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk
+with the Mind of Primitive Man before me, when the stampede over my
+head was repeated.  I waited for the second rush.  It came, and I
+proceeded to dress.
+
+The scene on the poop duplicated the previous one, save that the men
+were more excited, more frightened.  They were babbling and
+chattering all together.
+
+"Shut up!" Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them.  "One at a
+time, and answer the captain's question."
+
+"It ain't no barrel this time, sir," Tom Spink said.  "It's alive.
+An' if it ain't the devil it's the ghost of a drownded man.  I see 'm
+plain an' clear.  He's a man, or was a man once--"
+
+"They was two of 'em, sir," Richard Giller, one of the "bricklayers,"
+broke in.
+
+"I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir," Tom Spink went on.
+
+"An' the other was Jespersen--I seen 'm," Giller added.
+
+"They was three of 'em, sir," said Nosey Murphy.  "O'Sullivan, sir,
+was the other one.  They ain't devils, sir.  They're drownded men.
+They come aboard right over the bows, an' they moved slow like
+drownded men.  Sorensen seen the first one first.  He caught my arm
+an' pointed, an' then I seen 'm.  He was on top the for'ard-house.
+And Olansen seen 'm, an' Deacon, sir, an' Hackey.  We all seen 'm,
+sir . . . an' the second one; an' when the rest run away I stayed
+long enough to see the third one.  Mebbe there's more.  I didn't wait
+to see."
+
+Captain West stopped the man.
+
+"Mr. Pike," he said wearily, "will you straighten this nonsense out."
+
+"Yes, sir," Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the man.  "Come on,
+all of you!  There's three devils to tie down this time."
+
+But the men shrank away from the order and from him.
+
+"For two cents . . . " I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke
+off utterance.
+
+He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge.  In the same
+order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up
+the rear, we followed.  It was a similar journey, save that we caught
+a ducking midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on
+the 'midship-house.
+
+We halted on top the for'ard-house.  In vain Mr. Pike flashed his
+light-stick.  Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked
+dark water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the
+crash and thunder of seas falling aboard.  We advanced half-way
+across the last span of bridge to the f ore-castle head, and were
+driven to pause and hang on at the foremast by a bursting sea.
+
+Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick.  I heard him
+exclaim something.  Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed
+by Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and
+endured another ducking.  Through the emergencies I could see the
+pencil of light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there.
+Several minutes later the mates were back with me.
+
+"Half our head-gear's carried away," Mr. Pike told me.  "We must have
+run into something."
+
+"I felt a jar, right after you' went below, sir, last time," said Mr.
+Mellaire.  "Only I thought it was a thump of sea."
+
+"So did I feel it," the mate agreed.  "I was just taking off my
+boots.  I thought it was a sea.  But where are the three devils?"
+
+"Broaching the cask," the second mate suggested.
+
+We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went
+for'ard, inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea.  There lay the
+cask, securely lashed.  The size of the barnacles on it was
+astonishing.  They were as large as apples and inches deep.  A down-
+fling of bow brought a foot of water about our boots; and as the bow
+lifted and the water drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted
+cask streamers of seaweed a foot or so in length.
+
+Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the
+deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for'ard-house and
+found no devils.  The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and
+his light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the
+murky sea-lamp.  And we saw the devils.  Nosey Murphy had been right.
+There were three of them.
+
+Let me give the picture:  A drenched and freezing room of rusty,
+paint-scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking
+with the filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea.  In a
+top bunk, on his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily
+with blue, bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe,
+with hanging legs dragged this way and that by the churn of water,
+Mulligan Jacobs, solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody,
+who stand side by side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in
+unison to the Elsinore's down-flinging and up-lifting.
+
+But such men!  I know my East Side and my East End, and I am
+accustomed to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these
+three men I was at fault.  The Mediterranean had surely never bred
+such a breed; nor had Scandinavia.  They were not blonds.  They were
+not brunettes.  Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow.
+Their skin was white under a bronze of weather.  Wet as was their
+hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair.  Yet their eyes were
+dark--and yet not dark.  They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green,
+nor hazel.  Nor were they black.  They were topaz, pale topaz; and
+they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of great cats.  They regarded
+us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired storm-waifs with pale,
+topaz eyes.  They did not bow, they did not smile, in no way did they
+recognize our presence save that they looked at us and dreamed.
+
+But Andy Fay greeted us.
+
+"It's a hell of a night an' not a wink of sleep with these goings-
+on," he said.
+
+"Now where did they blow in from a night like this?" Mulligan Jacobs
+complained.
+
+"You've got a tongue in your mouth," Mr. Pike snarled.  "Why ain't
+you asked 'em?"
+
+"As though you didn't know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you
+old stiff," Jacobs snarled back.
+
+But it was no time for their private feud.  Mr. Pike turned on the
+dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted
+phrases of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon
+has had every opportunity to learn but is too stubborn-brained and
+wilful-mouthed to wrap his tongue about.
+
+The visitors made no reply.  They did not even shake their heads.
+Their faces remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and
+pleasant, while in their eyes floated profounder dreams.  Yet they
+were human.  The blood of their injuries stained them and clotted on
+their clothes.
+
+"Dutchmen," snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other breeds,
+as he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.
+
+Mr. Pike's ethnology is narrow.  Outside his own race he is aware of
+only three races:  niggers, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.
+
+Again our visitors proved themselves human.  They understood the
+mate's invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed
+into three top-bunks and closed their eyes.  I could swear the first
+of them was asleep in half a minute.
+
+"We'll have to clean up for'ard, or we'll be having the sticks about
+our ears," the mate said, already starting to depart.  "Get the men
+along, Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+
+And no westing!  We have been swept back three degrees of casting
+since the night our visitors came on board.  They are the great
+mystery, these three men of the sea.  "Horn Gypsies," Margaret calls
+them; and Mr. Pike dubs them "Dutchmen."  One thing is certain, they
+have a language of their own which they talk with one another.  But
+of our hotch-potch of nationalities fore and aft there is no person
+who catches an inkling of their language or nationality.
+
+Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but
+this was indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter,
+who swears he is a Finn himself.  Louis, the cook, avers that
+somewhere over the world, on some forgotten voyage, he has
+encountered men of their type; but he can neither remember the voyage
+nor their race.  He and the rest of the Asiatics accept their
+presence as a matter of course; but the crew, with the exception of
+Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very superstitious about the new-
+comers, and will have nothing to do with them.
+
+"No good will come of them, sir," Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us,
+shaking his head forebodingly.
+
+Margaret's mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy
+roll of the ship.  We had paused from our promenade, which we now
+take each day, religiously, as a constitutional, between eleven and
+twelve.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with them?" she queried, nudging me privily
+in warning of what was coming.
+
+"Because they ain't men, Miss, as we can rightly call men.  They
+ain't regular men."
+
+"It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board," she
+gurgled.
+
+"That's just it, Miss," Tom Spink exclaimed, brightening perceptibly
+at the hint of understanding.  "Where'd they come from?  They won't
+tell.  Of course they won't tell.  They ain't men.  They're spirits--
+ghosts of sailors that drowned as long ago as when that cask went
+adrift from a sinkin' ship, an' that's years an' years, Miss, as
+anybody can see, lookin' at the size of the barnacles on it."
+
+"Do you think so?" Margaret queried.
+
+"We all think so, Miss.  We ain't spent our lives on the sea for
+nothin'.  There's no end of landsmen don't believe in the Flyin'
+Dutchman.  But what do they know?  They're just landsmen, ain't they?
+They ain't never had their leg grabbed by a ghost, such as I had, on
+the Kathleen, thirty-five years ago, down in the hole 'tween the
+water-casks.  An' didn't that ghost rip the shoe right off of me?
+An' didn't I fall through the hatch two days later an' break my
+shoulder?"
+
+"Now, Miss, I seen 'em makin' signs to Mr. Pike that we'd run into
+their ship hove to on the other tack.  Don't you believe it.  There
+wasn't no ship."
+
+"But how do you explain the carrying away of our head-gear?" I
+demanded.
+
+"There's lots of things can't be explained, sir," was Tom Spink's
+answer.  "Who can explain the way the Finns plays tom-fool tricks
+with the weather?  Yet everybody knows it.  Why are we havin' a hard
+passage around the Horn, sir?  I ask you that.  Why, sir?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Because of the carpenter, sir.  We've found out he's a Finn.  Why
+did he keep it quiet all the way down from Baltimore?"
+
+"Why did he tell it?" Margaret challenged.
+
+"He didn't tell it, Miss--leastways, not until after them three
+others boarded us.  I got my suspicions he knows more about 'm than
+he's lettin' on.  An' look at the weather an' the delay we're
+gettin'.  An' don't everybody know the Finns is regular warlocks an'
+weather-breeders?"
+
+My ears pricked up.
+
+"Where did you get that word warlock?" I questioned.
+
+Tom Spink looked puzzled.
+
+"What's wrong with it, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Nothing.  It's all right.  But where did you get it?"
+
+"I never got it, sir.  I always had it.  That's what Finns is--
+warlocks."
+
+"And these three new-comers--they aren't Finns?" asked Margaret.
+
+The old Englishman shook his head solemnly.
+
+"No, Miss.  They're drownded sailors a long time drownded.  All you
+have to do is look at 'm.  An' the carpenter could tell us a few if
+he was minded."
+
+
+Nevertheless, our mysterious visitors are a welcome addition to our
+weakened crew.  I watch them at work.  They are strong and willing.
+Mr. Pike says they are real sailormen, even if he doesn't understand
+their lingo.  His theory is that they are from some small old-country
+or outlander ship, which, hove to on the opposite tack to the
+Elsinore, was run down and sunk.
+
+I have forgotten to say that we found the barnacled cask nearly
+filled with a most delicious wine which none of us can name.  As soon
+as the gale moderated Mr. Pike had the cask brought aft and broached,
+and now the steward and Wada have it all in bottles and spare
+demijohns.  It is beautifully aged, and Mr. Pike is certain that it
+is some sort of a mild and unheard-of brandy.  Mr. Mellaire merely
+smacks his lips over it, while Captain West, Margaret, and I
+steadfastly maintain that it is wine.
+
+The condition of the men grows deplorable.  They were always poor at
+pulling on ropes, but now it takes two or three to pull as much as
+one used to pull.  One thing in their favour is that they are well,
+though grossly, fed.  They have all they want to eat, such as it is,
+but it is the cold and wet, the terrible condition of the forecastle,
+the lack of sleep, and the almost continuous toil of both watches on
+deck.  Either watch is so weak and worthless that any severe task
+requires the assistance of the other watch.  As an instance, we
+finally managed a reef in the fore-sail in the thick of a gale.  It
+took both watches two hours, yet Mr. Pike tells me that under similar
+circumstances, with an average crew of the old days, he has seen a
+single watch reef the foresail in twenty minutes.
+
+I have learned one of the prime virtues of a steel sailing-ship.
+Such a craft, heavily laden, does not strain her seams open in bad
+weather and big seas.  Except for a tiny leak down in the fore-peak,
+with which we sailed from Baltimore and which is bailed out with a
+pail once in several weeks, the Elsinore is bone-dry.  Mr. Pike tells
+me that had a wooden ship of her size and cargo gone through the
+buffeting we have endured, she would be leaking like a sieve.
+
+And Mr. Mellaire, out of his own experience, has added to my respect
+for the Horn.  When he was a young man he was once eight weeks in
+making around from 50 in the Atlantic to 50 in the Pacific.  Another
+time his vessel was compelled to put back twice to the Falklands for
+repairs.  And still another time, in a wooden ship running back in
+distress to the Falklands, his vessel was lost in a shift of gale in
+the very entrance to Port Stanley.  As he told me:
+
+"And after we'd been there a month, sir, who should come in but the
+old Lucy Powers.  She was a sight!--her foremast clean gone out of
+her and half her spars, the old man killed from one of the spars
+falling on him, the mate with two broken arms, the second mate sick,
+and what was left of the crew at the pumps.  We'd lost our ship, so
+my skipper took charge, refitted her, doubled up both crews, and we
+headed the other way around, pumping two hours in every watch clear
+to Honolulu."
+
+The poor wretched chickens!  Because of their ill-judged moulting
+they are quite featherless.  It is a marvel that one of them
+survives, yet so far we have lost only six.  Margaret keeps the
+kerosene stove going, and, though they have ceased laying, she
+confidently asserts that they are all layers and that we shall have
+plenty of eggs once we get fine weather in the Pacific.
+
+There is little use to describe these monotonous and perpetual
+westerly gales.  One is very like another, and they follow so fast on
+one another's heels that the sea never has a chance to grow calm.  So
+long have we rolled and tossed about that the thought, say, of a
+solid, unmoving billiard-table is inconceivable.  In previous
+incarnations I have encountered things that did not move, but . . .
+they were in previous incarnations.
+
+We have been up to the Diego Ramirez Rocks twice in the past ten
+days.  At the present moment, by vague dead reckoning, we are two
+hundred miles east of them.  We have been hove down to our hatches
+three times in the last week.  We have had six stout sails, of the
+heaviest canvas, furled and double-gasketed, torn loose and stripped
+from the yards.  Sometimes, so weak are our men, not more than half
+of them can respond to the call for all hands.
+
+Lars Jacobson, who had his leg broken early in the voyage, was
+knocked down by a sea several days back and had the leg rebroken.
+Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed Norwegian, went Berserker last night
+in the second dog-watch and pretty well cleaned out his half of the
+forecastle.  Wada reports that it required the bricklayers,
+Fitzgibbon and Gilder, the Maltese Cockney, and Steve Roberts, the
+cowboy, finally to subdue the madman.  These are all men of Mr.
+Mellaire's watch.  In Mr. Pike's watch John Hackey, the San Francisco
+hoodlum, who has stood out against the gangsters, has at last
+succumbed and joined them.  And only this morning Mr. Pike dragged
+Charles Davis by the scruff of the neck out of the forecastle, where
+he had caught him expounding sea-law to the miserable creatures.  Mr.
+Mellaire, I notice on occasion, remains unduly intimate with the
+gangster clique.  And yet nothing serious happens.
+
+And Charles Davis does not die.  He seems actually to be gaining in
+weight.  He never misses a meal.  From the break of the poop, in the
+shelter of the weather cloth, our decks a thunder and rush of
+freezing water, I often watch him slip out of his room between seas,
+mug and plate in hand, and hobble for'ard to the galley for his food.
+He is a keen judge of the ship's motions, for never yet have I seen
+him get a serious ducking.  Sometimes, of course, he may get
+splattered with spray or wet to the knees, but he manages to be out
+of the way whenever a big graybeard falls on board.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+
+A wonderful event to-day!  For five minutes, at noon, the sun was
+actually visible.  But such a sun!--a pale and cold and sickly orb
+that at meridian was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon.
+And within the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the
+snow-gusts of a fresh south-west gale.
+
+WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE WESTING! MAKE WESTING!--this sailing rule of
+the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron.  I can
+understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
+sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a
+boat.  Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around
+from east to west.
+
+And we make easting!  This west wind is eternal.  I listen
+incredulously when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when
+easterly winds have blown in these latitudes.  It is impossible.
+Always does the west wind blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting,
+else why the "Great West Wind Drift" printed on the charts!  We of
+the afterguard are weary of this eternal buffeting.  Our men have
+become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded shadows of men.  I should not
+be surprised, in the end, to see Captain West turn tail and run
+eastward around the world to Seattle.  But Margaret smiles with
+surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her father will win
+around to 50 in the Pacific.
+
+How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room
+of iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me
+that the wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down
+in their bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of
+the watches.
+
+Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty
+miles due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a
+driving gale, on the port tack.  The glass is down to 28.58, and even
+Mr. Pike acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters
+he has ever experienced.
+
+In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64
+degrees or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a
+favouring spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the
+extreme-narrowing wedges of longitude.  But of late years all
+shipmasters have accepted the hugging of the land all the way around.
+Out of ten times ten thousand passages of Cape Stiff from east to
+west, this, they have concluded, is the best strategy.  So Captain
+West hugs the land.  He heaves-to on the port tack until the leeward
+drift brings the land into perilous proximity, then wears ship and
+heaves-to on the port tack and makes leeway off shore.
+
+I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
+frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it.  In my brain burns
+the flame of a great discovery and a great achievement.  I have found
+what makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
+philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make.  I
+have found the love of woman.  I do not know whether she cares for
+me.  Nor is that the point.  The point is that in myself I have risen
+to the greatest height to which the human male animal can rise.
+
+I know a woman and her name is Margaret.  She is Margaret, a woman
+and desirable.  My blood is red.  I am not the pallid scholar I so
+proudly deemed myself to be.  I am a man, and a lover, despite the
+books.  As for De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped
+as I now am, I shall confute him with the same ease that he has
+confuted all the schools.  Love is the final word.  To the rational
+man it alone gives the super-rational sanction for living.  Like
+Bergson in his overhanging heaven of intuition, or like one who has
+bathed in Pentecostal fire and seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod
+the materialistic dictums of science underfoot, scaled the last peak
+of philosophy, and leaped into my heaven, which, after all, is within
+myself.  The stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it
+finds its supreme realization in the love of woman.  It is the
+vindication of being.  Yes, and it is the wages of being, the payment
+in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh and breath.
+
+And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know
+what women are.  And I know Margaret for what she is--mere woman; and
+yet I know, in the lover's soul of me, that she is somehow different.
+Her ways are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are
+delightful to me.  In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-
+builder, for of a surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways.
+And who shall say which is the worthier--the writing of a whole
+library or the building of a nest?
+
+The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by.  It is
+now a month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are,
+not so well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a
+hundred miles south of the Straits of Le Maire.  Even this position
+is conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the
+leeway of a ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with
+always the Great West Wind Drift making against us.  It is four days
+since our last instrument-sight of the sun.
+
+This storm-vexed ocean has become populous.  No ships are getting
+round, and each day adds to our number.  Never a brief day passes
+without our sighting from two or three to a dozen hove-to on port
+tack or starboard tack.  Captain West estimates there must be at
+least two hundred sail of us.  A ship hove-to with preventer tackles
+on the rudder-head is unmanageable.  Each night we take our chance of
+unavoidable and disastrous collision.  And at times, glimpsed through
+the snow-squalls, we see and curse the ships, east-bound, that drive
+past us with the West Wind and the West Wind Drift at their backs.
+And so wild is the mind of man that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire still
+aver that on occasion they have known gales to blow ships from east
+to west around the Horn.  It surely has been a year since we of the
+Elsinore emerged from under the lee of Tierra Del Fuego into the
+snorting south-west gales.  A century, at least, has elapsed since we
+sailed from Baltimore.
+
+
+And I don't give a snap of my fingers for all the wrath and fury of
+this dim-gray sea at the tip of the earth.  I have told Margaret that
+I love her.  The tale was told in the shelter of the weather cloth,
+where we clung together in the second dog-watch last evening.  And it
+was told again, and by both of us, in the bright-lighted chart-room
+after the watches had been changed at eight bells.  Yes, and her face
+was storm-bright, and all of her was very proud, save that her eyes
+were warm and soft and fluttered with lids that just would flutter
+maidenly and womanly.  It was a great hour--our great hour.
+
+A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved.
+Grievous indeed must be the fate of the lover who is unloved.  And I,
+for one, and for still other reasons, congratulate myself upon the
+vastitude of my good fortune.  For see, were Margaret any other sort
+of a woman, were she . . . well, just the lovely and lovable and
+adorably snuggly sort who seem made just precisely for love and
+loving and nestling into the strong arms of a man--why, there
+wouldn't be anything remarkable or wonderful about her loving me.
+But Margaret is Margaret, strong, self-possessed, serene, controlled,
+a very mistress of herself.  And there's the miracle--that such a
+woman should have been awakened to love by me.  It is almost
+unbelievable.  I go out of my way to get another peep into those
+long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting soft as she
+looks at me.  She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank the Lord I
+am no Romeo.  And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and under
+my breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards
+thundering down on us, that I am a lover.  And I send messages to the
+lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover.  And I
+look at the wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge
+and know that never in ten thousand wretched lives could they
+experience the love I experience, and I wonder why God ever made
+them.
+
+
+"And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start," Margaret
+confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from
+my arms, "was that I would not permit you to make love to me."
+
+"True daughter of Herodias," I gaily gibed, "so such was the drift of
+your thoughts even as early as the very start.  Already you were
+looking upon me with a considerative female eye."
+
+She laughed proudly, and did not reply.
+
+"What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to
+you?" I insisted.
+
+"Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages," she
+replied.
+
+"Then others have . . . ?"
+
+"They always do," she assured me gravely.
+
+And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but
+I laughed it away and retorted:
+
+"It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as
+having said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered,
+namely, that a woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of
+him."
+
+"Wretch!" she cried.  "I never fluttered.  When did I ever flutter!"
+
+"It is a delicate subject . . . " I began with assumed hesitancy.
+
+"When did I ever flutter?" she demanded.
+
+I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer's ruses by making a shift.
+
+"From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to
+miss observing," I charged.  "I'll wager you knew as quickly as I the
+very instant when I first loved you."
+
+"I knew the first time you hated me," she evaded.
+
+"Yes, I know, the first time I saw you and learned that you were
+coming on the voyage," I said.  "But now I repeat my challenge.  You
+knew as quickly as I the first instant I loved you."
+
+Oh, her eyes were beautiful, and the repose and certitude of her were
+tremendous, as she rested her hand on my arm for a moment and in a
+low, quiet voice said:
+
+"Yes, I . . . I think I know.  It was the morning of that pampero off
+the Plate, when you were thrown through the door into my father's
+stateroom.  I saw it in your eyes.  I knew it.  I think it was the
+first time, the very instant."
+
+I could only nod my head and draw her close to me.  And she looked up
+at me and added:
+
+"You were very ridiculous.  There you sat, on the bed, holding on
+with one hand and nursing the other hand under your arm, staring at
+me, irritated, startled, utterly foolish, and then . . . how, I don't
+know . . . I knew that you had just come to know . . . "
+
+"And the very next instant you froze up," I charged ungallantly.
+
+"And that was why," she admitted shamelessly, then leaned away from
+me, her hands resting on my shoulders, while she gurgled and her lips
+parted from over her beautiful white teeth.
+
+One thing I, John Pathurst, know:  that gurgling laughter of hers is
+the most adorable laughter that was ever heard.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+
+I wonder.  I wonder.  Did the Samurai make a mistake?  Or was it the
+darkness of oncoming death that chilled and clouded that star-cool
+brain of his, and made a mock of all his wisdom?  Or was it the
+blunder that brought death upon him beforehand?  I do not know, I
+shall never know; for it is a matter no one of us dreams of hinting
+at, much less discussing.
+
+I shall begin at the beginning--yesterday afternoon.  For it was
+yesterday afternoon, five weeks to a day since we emerged from the
+Straits of Le Maire into this gray storm-ocean, that once again we
+found ourselves hove to directly off the Horn.  At the changing of
+the watches at four o'clock, Captain West gave the command to Mr.
+Pike to wear ship.  We were on the starboard tack at the time, making
+leeway off shore.  This manoeuvre placed us on the port tack, and the
+consequent leeway, to me, seemed on shore, though at an acute angle,
+to be sure.
+
+In the chart-room, glancing curiously at the chart, I measured the
+distance with my eye and decided that we were in the neighbourhood of
+fifteen miles off Cape Horn.
+
+"With our drift we'll be close up under the land by morning, won't
+we?" I ventured tentatively.
+
+"Yes," Captain West nodded; "and if it weren't for the West Wind
+Drift, and if the land did not trend to the north-east, we'd be
+ashore by morning.  As it is, we'll be well under it at daylight,
+ready to steal around if there is a change, ready to wear ship if
+there is no change."
+
+It did not enter my head to question his judgment.  What he said had
+to be.  Was he not the Samurai?
+
+And yet, a few minutes later, when he had gone below, I noticed Mr.
+Pike enter the chart-house.  After several paces up and down, and a
+brief pause to watch Nancy and several men shift the weather cloth
+from lee to weather, I strolled aft to the chart-house.  Prompted by
+I know not what, I peeped through one of the glass ports.
+
+There stood Mr. Pike, his sou'wester doffed, his oilskins streaming
+rivulets to the floor, while he, dividers and parallel rulers in
+hand, bent over the chart.  It was the expression of his face that
+startled me.  The habitual sourness had vanished.  All that I could
+see was anxiety and apprehension . . . yes, and age.  I had never
+seen him look so old; for there, at that moment, I beheld the wastage
+and weariness of all his sixty-nine years of sea-battling and sea-
+staring.
+
+I slipped away from the port and went along the deck to the break of
+the poop, where I held on and stood staring through the gray and
+spray in the conjectural direction of our drift.  Somewhere, there,
+in the north-east and north, I knew was a broken, iron coast of rocks
+upon which the graybeards thundered.  And there, in the chart-room, a
+redoubtable sailorman bent anxiously over a chart as he measured and
+calculated, and measured and calculated again, our position and our
+drift.
+
+And I knew it could not be.  It was not the Samurai but the henchman
+who was weak and wrong.  Age was beginning to tell upon him at last,
+which could not be otherwise than expected when one considered that
+no man in ten thousand had weathered age so successfully as he.
+
+I laughed at my moment's qualm of foolishness and went below, well
+content to meet my loved one and to rest secure in her father's
+wisdom.  Of course he was right.  He had proved himself right too
+often already on the long voyage from Baltimore.
+
+At dinner Mr. Pike was quite distrait.  He took no part whatever in
+the conversation, and seemed always to be listening to something from
+without--to the vexing clang of taut ropes that came down the hollow
+jiggermast, to the muffled roar of the gale in the rigging, to the
+smash and crash of the seas along our decks and against our iron
+walls.
+
+Again I found myself sharing his apprehension, although I was too
+discreet to question him then, or afterwards alone, about his
+trouble.  At eight he went on deck again to take the watch till
+midnight, and as I went to bed I dismissed all forebodings and
+speculated as to how many more voyages he could last after this
+sudden onslaught of old age.
+
+I fell asleep quickly, and awoke at midnight, my lamp still burning,
+Conrad's Mirror of the Sea on my breast where it had dropped from my
+hands.  I heard the watches change, and was wide awake and reading
+when Mr. Pike came below by the booby-hatch and passed down my hail
+by my open door, on his way to his room.
+
+In the pause I had long since learned so well I knew he was rolling a
+cigarette.  Then I heard him cough, as he always did, when the
+cigarette was lighted and the first inhalation of smoke flushed his
+lungs.
+
+At twelve-fifteen, in the midst of Conrad's delightful chapter, "The
+Weight of the Burden," I heard Mr. Pike come along the hall.
+
+Stealing a glance over the top of my book, I saw him go by, sea-
+booted, oilskinned, sou'westered.  It was his watch below, and his
+sleep was meagre in this perpetual bad weather, yet he was going on
+deck.
+
+I read and waited for an hour, but he did not return; and I knew that
+somewhere up above he was staring into the driving dark.  I dressed
+fully, in all my heavy storm-gear, from sea-boots and sou'-wester to
+sheepskin under my oilskin coat.  At the foot of the stairs I noted
+along the hall that Margaret's light was burning.  I peeped in--she
+keeps her door open for ventilation--and found her reading.
+
+"Merely not sleepy," she assured me.
+
+Nor in the heart of me do I believe she had any apprehension.  She
+does not know even now, I am confident, the Samurai's blunder--if
+blunder it was.  As she said, she was merely not sleepy, although
+there is no telling in what occult ways she may have received though
+not recognized Mr. Pike's anxiety.
+
+At the head of the stairs, passing along the tiny hall to go out the
+lee door of the chart-house, I glanced into the chart-room.  On the
+couch, lying on his back, his head uncomfortably high, I thought,
+slept Captain West.  The room was warm from the ascending heat of the
+cabin, so that he lay unblanketed, fully dressed save for oilskins
+and boots.  He breathed easily and steadily, and the lean, ascetic
+lines of his face seemed softened by the light of the low-turned
+lamp.  And that one glance restored to me all my surety and faith in
+his wisdom, so that I laughed at myself for having left my warm bed
+for a freezing trip on deck.
+
+Under the weather cloth at the break of the poop I found Mr.
+Mellaire.  He was wide awake, but under no strain.  Evidently it had
+not entered his mind to consider, much less question, the manoeuvre
+of wearing ship the previous afternoon.
+
+"The gale is breaking," he told me, waving his mittened hand at a
+starry segment of sky momentarily exposed by the thinning clouds.
+
+But where was Mr. Pike?  Did the second mate know he was on deck?  I
+proceeded to feel Mr. Mellaire out as we worked our way aft, along
+the mad poop toward the wheel.  I talked about the difficulty of
+sleeping in stormy weather, stated the restlessness and semi-insomnia
+that the violent motion of the ship caused in me, and raised the
+query of how bad weather affected the officers.
+
+"I noticed Captain West, in the chart-room, as I came up, sleeping
+like a baby," I concluded.
+
+We leaned in the lee of the chart-house and went no farther.
+
+"Trust us to sleep just the same way, Mr. Pathurst," the second mate
+laughed.  "The harder the weather the harder the demand on us, and
+the harder we sleep.  I'm dead the moment my head touches the pillow.
+It takes Mr. Pike longer, because he always finishes his cigarette
+after he turns in.  But he smokes while he's undressing, so that he
+doesn't require more than a minute to go deado.  I'll wager he hasn't
+moved, right now, since ten minutes after twelve."
+
+So the second mate did not dream the first was even on deck.  I went
+below to make sure.  A small sea-lamp was burning in Mr. Pike's room,
+and I saw his bunk unoccupied.  I went in by the big stove in the
+dining-room and warmed up, then again came on deck.  I did not go
+near the weather cloth, where I was certain Mr. Mellaire was; but,
+keeping along the lee of the poop, I gained the bridge and started
+for'ard.
+
+I was in no hurry, so I paused often in that cold, wet journey.  The
+gale was breaking, for again and again the stars glimmered through
+the thinning storm-clouds.  On the 'midship-house was no Mr. Pike.  I
+crossed it, stung by the freezing, flying spray, and carefully
+reconnoitred the top of the for'ard-house, where, in such bad
+weather, I knew the lookout was stationed.  I was within twenty feet
+of them, when a wider clearance of starry sky showed me the figures
+of the lookout, whoever he was, and of Mr. Pike, side by side.  Long
+I watched them, not making my presence known, and I knew that the old
+mate's eyes were boring like gimlets into the windy darkness that
+separated the Elsinore from the thunder-surfed iron coast he sought
+to find.
+
+Coming back to the poop I was caught by the surprised Mr. Mellaire.
+
+"Thought you were asleep, sir," he chided.
+
+"I'm too restless," I explained.  "I've read until my eyes are tired,
+and now I'm trying to get chilled so that I can fall asleep while
+warming up in my blankets."
+
+"I envy you, sir," he answered.  "Think of it!  So much of all night
+in that you cannot sleep.  Some day, if ever I make a lucky strike, I
+shall make a voyage like this as a passenger, and have all watches
+below.  Think of it!  All blessed watches below!  And I shall, like
+you, sir, bring a Jap servant along, and I'll make him call me at
+every changing of the watches, so that, wide awake, I can appreciate
+my good fortune in the several minutes before I roll over and go to
+sleep again."
+
+We laughed good night to each other.  Another peep into the chart-
+room showed me Captain West sleeping as before.  He had not moved in
+general, though all his body moved with every roll and fling of the
+ship.  Below, Margaret's light still burned, but a peep showed her
+asleep, her book fallen from her hands just as was the so frequent
+case with my books.
+
+And I wondered.  Half the souls of us on the Elsinore slept.  The
+Samurai slept.  Yet the old first mate, who should have slept, kept a
+bitter watch on the for'ard-house.  Was his anxiety right?  Could it
+be right?  Or was it the crankiness of ultimate age?  Were we
+drifting and leewaying to destruction?  Or was it merely an old man
+being struck down by senility in the midst of his life-task?
+
+Too wide awake to think of sleeping, I ensconced myself with The
+Mirror of the Sea at the dining-table.  Nor did I remove aught of my
+storm-gear save the soggy mittens, which I wrung out and hung to dry
+by the stove.  Four bells struck, and six bells, and Mr. Pike had not
+returned below.  At eight bells, with the changing of the watches, it
+came upon me what a night of hardship the old mate was enduring.
+Eight to twelve had been his own watch on deck.  He had now completed
+the four hours of the second mate's watch and was beginning his own
+watch, which would last till eight in the morning--twelve consecutive
+hours in a Cape Horn gale with the mercury at freezing.
+
+Next--for I had dozed--I heard loud cries above my head that were
+repeated along the poop.  I did not know till afterwards that it was
+Mr. Pike's command to hard-up the helm, passed along from for'ard by
+the men he had stationed at intervals on the bridge.
+
+All that I knew at this shock of waking was that something was
+happening above.  As I pulled on my steaming mittens and hurried my
+best up the reeling stairs, I could hear the stamp of men's feet that
+for once were not lagging.  In the chart-house hall I heard Mr. Pike,
+who had already covered the length of the bridge from the for'ard-
+house, shouting:
+
+"Mizzen-braces!  Slack, damn you!  Slack on the run!  But hold a
+turn!  Aft, here, all of you!  Jump!  Lively, if you don't want to
+swim!  Come in, port-braces!  Don't let 'm get away!  Lee-braces!--if
+you lose that turn I'll split your skull!  Lively!  Lively!--Is that
+helm hard over!  Why in hell don't you answer?"
+
+All this I heard as I dashed for the lee door and as I wondered why I
+did not hear the Samurai's voice.
+
+Then, as I passed the chart-room door, I saw him.
+
+He was sitting on the couch, white-faced, one sea-boot in his hands,
+and I could have sworn his hands were shaking.  That much I saw, and
+the next moment was out on deck.
+
+At first, just emerged from the light, I could see nothing, although
+I could hear men at the pin-rails and the mate snarling and shouting
+commands.  But I knew the manoeuvre.  With a weak crew, in the big,
+tail-end sea of a broken gale, breakers and destruction under her
+lee, the Elsinore was being worn around.  We had been under lower-
+topsails and a reefed foresail all night.  Mr. Pike's first action,
+after putting the wheel up, had been to square the mizzen-yards.
+With the wind-pressure thus eased aft, the stern could more easily
+swing against the wind while the wind-pressure on the for'ard-sails
+paid the bow off.
+
+But it takes time to wear a ship, under short canvas, in a big sea.
+Slowly, very slowly, I could feel the direction of the wind altering
+against my cheek.  The moon, dim at first, showed brighter and
+brighter as the last shreds of a flying cloud drove away from before
+it.  In vain I looked for any land.
+
+"Main-braces!--all of you!--jump!" Mr. Pike shouted, himself leading
+the rush along the poop.  And the men really rushed.  Not in all the
+months I had observed them had I seen such swiftness of energy.
+
+I made my way to the wheel, where Tom Spink stood.  He did not notice
+me.  With one hand holding the idle wheel, he was leaning out to one
+side, his eyes fixed in a fascinated stare.  I followed its
+direction, on between the chart-house and the port-jigger shrouds,
+and on across a mountain sea that was very vague in the moonlight.
+And then I saw it!  The Elsinore's stern was flung skyward, and
+across that cold ocean I saw land--black rocks and snow-covered
+slopes and crags.  And toward this land the Elsinore, now almost
+before the wind, was driving.
+
+From the 'midship-house came the snarls of the mate and the cries of
+the sailors.  They were pulling and hauling for very life.  Then came
+Mr. Pike, across the poop, leaping with incredible swiftness, sending
+his snarl before him.
+
+"Ease that wheel there!  What the hell you gawkin' at?  Steady her as
+I tell you.  That's all you got to do!"
+
+From for'ard came a cry, and I knew Mr. Mellaire was on top of the
+for'ard-house and managing the fore-yards.
+
+"Now!"--from Mr. Pike.  "More spokes!  Steady!  Steady!  And be ready
+to check her!"
+
+He bounded away along the poop again, shouting for men for the
+mizzen-braces.  And the men appeared, some of his watch, others of
+the second mate's watch, routed from sleep--men coatless, and
+hatless, and bootless; men ghastly-faced with fear but eager for once
+to spring to the orders of the man who knew and could save their
+miserable lives from miserable death.  Yes--and I noted the delicate-
+handed cook, and Yatsuda, the sail-maker, pulling with his one
+unparalysed hand.  It was all hands to save ship, and all hands knew
+it.  Even Sundry Buyers, who had drifted aft in his stupidity instead
+of being for'ard with his own officer, forebore to stare about and to
+press his abdomen.  For the nonce he pulled like a youngling of
+twenty.
+
+The moon covered again, and it was in darkness that the Elsinore
+rounded up on the wind on the starboard tack.  This, in her case,
+under lower-topsails only, meant that she lay eight points from the
+wind, or, in land terms, at right angles to the wind.
+
+Mr. Pike was splendid, marvellous.  Even as the Elsinore was rounding
+to on the wind, while the head-yards were still being braced, and
+even as he was watching the ship's behaviour and the wheel, in
+between his commands to Tom Spink of "A spoke!  A spoke or two!
+Another!  Steady!  Hold her!  Ease her!" he was ordering the men
+aloft to loose sail.  I had thought, the manoeuvre of wearing
+achieved, that we were saved, but this setting of all three upper-
+topsails unconvinced me.
+
+The moon remained hidden, and to leeward nothing could be seen.  As
+each sail was set, the Elsinore was pressed farther and farther over,
+and I realized that there was plenty of wind left, despite the fact
+that the gale had broken or was breaking.  Also, under this
+additional canvas, I could feel the Elsinore moving through the
+water.  Pike now sent the Maltese Cockney to help Tom Spink at the
+wheel.  As for himself, he took his stand beside the booby-hatch,
+where he could gauge the Elsinore, gaze to leeward, and keep his eye
+on the helmsmen.
+
+"Full and by," was his reiterated command.  "Keep her a good full--a
+rap-full; but don't let her fall away.  Hold her to it, and drive
+her."
+
+He took no notice whatever of me, although I, on my way to the lee of
+the chart-house, stood at his shoulder a full minute, offering him a
+chance to speak.  He knew I was there, for his big shoulder brushed
+my arm as he swayed and turned to warn the helmsmen in the one breath
+to hold her up to it but to keep her full.  He had neither time nor
+courtesy for a passenger in such a moment.
+
+Sheltering by the chart-house, I saw the moon appear.  It grew
+brighter and brighter, and I saw the land, dead to leeward of us, not
+three hundred yards away.  It was a cruel sight--black rock and
+bitter snow, with cliffs so perpendicular that the Elsinore could
+have laid alongside of them in deep water, with great gashes and
+fissures, and with great surges thundering and spouting along all the
+length of it.
+
+Our predicament was now clear to me.  We had to weather the bight of
+land and islands into which we had drifted, and sea and wind worked
+directly on shore.  The only way out was to drive through the water,
+to drive fast and hard, and this was borne in upon me by Mr. Pike
+bounding past to the break of the poop, where I heard him shout to
+Mr. Mellaire to set the mainsail.
+
+Evidently the second mate was dubious, for the next cry of Mr. Pike's
+was:
+
+"Damn the reef!  You'd be in hell first!  Full mainsail!  All hands
+to it!"
+
+The difference was appreciable at once when that huge spread of
+canvas opposed the wind.  The Elsinore fairly leaped and quivered as
+she sprang to it, and I could feel her eat to windward as she at the
+same time drove faster ahead.  Also, in the rolls and gusts, she was
+forced down till her lee-rail buried and the sea foamed level across
+to her hatches.  Mr. Pike watched her like a hawk, and like certain
+death he watched the Maltese Cockney and Tom Spink at the wheel.
+
+"Land on the lee bow!" came a cry from for'ard, that was carried on
+from mouth to mouth along the bridge to the poop.
+
+I saw Mr. Pike nod his head grimly and sarcastically.  He had already
+seen it from the lee-poop, and what he had not seen he had guessed.
+A score of times I saw him test the weight of the gusts on his cheek
+and with all the brain of him study the Elsinore's behaviour.  And I
+knew what was in his mind.  Could she carry what she had?  Could she
+carry more?
+
+Small wonder, in this tense passage of time, that I had forgotten the
+Samurai.  Nor did I remember him until the chart-house door swung
+open and I caught him by the arm.  He steadied and swayed beside me,
+while he watched that cruel picture of rock and snow and spouting
+surf.
+
+"A good full!" Mr. Pike snarled.  "Or I'll eat your heart out.  God
+damn you for the farmer's hound you are, Tom Spink!.  Ease her!  Ease
+her!  Ease her into the big ones, damn you!  Don't let her head fall
+off!  Steady!  Where in hell did you learn to steer?  What cow-farm
+was you raised on?"
+
+Here he bounded for'ard past us with those incredible leaps of his.
+
+"It would be good to set the mizzen-topgallant," I heard Captain West
+mutter in a weak, quavery voice.  "Mr. Pathurst, will you please tell
+Mr. Pike to set the mizzen-topgallant?"
+
+And at that very instant Mr. Pike's voice rang out from the break of
+the poop:
+
+"Mr. Mellaire!--the mizzen-topgallant!"
+
+Captain West's head drooped until his chin rested on his breast, and
+so low did he mutter that I leaned to hear.
+
+"A very good officer," he said.  "An excellent officer.  Mr.
+Pathurst, if you will kindly favour me, I should like to go in.  I .
+. . I haven't got on my boots."
+
+The muscular feat was to open the heavy iron door and hold it open in
+the rolls and plunges.  This I accomplished; but when I had helped
+Captain West across the high threshold he thanked me and waived
+further services.  And I did not know even then he was dying.
+
+Never was a Blackwood ship driven as was the Elsinore during the next
+half-hour.  The full-jib was also set, and, as it departed in shreds,
+the fore-topmast staysail was being hoisted.  For'ard of the
+'midship-house it was made unlivable by the bursting seas.  Mr.
+Mellaire, with half the crew, clung on somehow on top the 'midship-
+house, while the rest of the crew was with us in the comparative
+safety of the poop.  Even Charles Davis, drenched and shivering, hung
+on beside me to the brass ring-handle of the chart-house door.
+
+Such sailing!  It was a madness of speed and motion, for the Elsinore
+drove over and through and under those huge graybeards that thundered
+shore-ward.  There were times, when rolls and gusts worked against
+her at the same moment, when I could have sworn the ends of her
+lower-yardarms swept the sea.
+
+It was one chance in ten that we could claw off.  All knew it, and
+all knew there was nothing more to do but await the issue.  And we
+waited in silence.  The only voice was that of the mate,
+intermittently cursing, threatening, and ordering Tom Spink and the
+Maltese Cockney at the wheel.  Between whiles, and all the while, he
+gauged the gusts, and ever his eyes lifted to the main-topgallant-
+yard.  He wanted to set that one more sail.  A dozen times I saw him
+half-open his mouth to give the order he dared not give.  And as I
+watched him, so all watched him.  Hard-bitten, bitter-natured, sour-
+featured and snarling-mouthed, he was the one man, the henchman of
+the race, the master of the moment.  "And where," was my thought, "O
+where was the Samurai?"
+
+One chance in ten?  It was one in a hundred as we fought to weather
+the last bold tooth of rock that gashed into sea and tempest between
+us and open ocean.  So close were we that I looked to see our far-
+reeling skysail-yards strike the face of the rock.  So close were we,
+no more than a biscuit toss from its iron buttress, that as we sank
+down into the last great trough between two seas I can swear every
+one of us held breath and waited for the Elsinore to strike.
+
+Instead we drove free.  And as if in very rage at our escape, the
+storm took that moment to deal us the mightiest buffet of all.  The
+mate felt that monster sea coming, for he sprang to the wheel ere the
+blow fell.  I looked for'ard, and I saw all for'ard blotted out by
+the mountain of water that fell aboard.  The Elsinore righted from
+the shock and reappeared to the eye, full of water from rail to rail.
+Then a gust caught her sails and heeled her over, spilling half the
+enormous burden outboard again.
+
+Along the bridge came the relayed cry of "Man overboard!"
+
+I glanced at the mate, who had just released the wheel to the
+helmsmen.  He shook his head, as if irritated by so trivial a
+happening, walked to the corner of the half-wheelhouse, and stared at
+the coast he had escaped, white and black and cold in the moonlight.
+
+Mr. Mellaire came aft, and they met beside me in the lee of the
+chart-house.
+
+"All hands, Mr. Mellaire," the mate said, "and get the mainsail off
+of her.  After that, the mizzen-topgallant."
+
+"Yes, sir," said the second.
+
+"Who was it?" the mate asked, as Mr. Mellaire was turning away.
+
+"Boney--he was no good, anyway," came the answer.
+
+That was all.  Boney the Splinter was gone, and all hands were
+answering the command of Mr. Mellaire to take in the mainsail.  But
+they never took it in; for at that moment it started to blow away out
+of the bolt-ropes, and in but few moments all that was left of it was
+a few short, slatting ribbons.
+
+"Mizzen-topgallant-sail!" Mr. Pike ordered.  Then, and for the first
+time, he recognized my existence.
+
+"Well rid of it," he growled.  "It never did set properly.  I was
+always aching to get my hands on the sail-maker that made it."
+
+On my way below a glance into the chart-room gave me the cue to the
+Samurai's blunder--if blunder it can be called, for no one will ever
+know.  He lay on the floor in a loose heap, rolling willy-nilly with
+every roll of the Elsinore.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+
+There is so much to write about all at once.  In the first place,
+Captain West.  Not entirely unexpected was his death.  Margaret tells
+me that she was apprehensive from the start of the voyage--and even
+before.  It was because of her apprehension that she so abruptly
+changed her plans and accompanied her father.
+
+What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that
+it was some stroke of the heart.  And yet, after the stroke, did he
+not come out on deck?  Or could the first stroke have been followed
+by another and fatal one after I had helped him inside through the
+door?  And even so, I have never heard of a heart-stroke being
+preceded hours before by a weakening of the mind.  Captain West's
+mind seemed quite clear, and must have been quite clear, that last
+afternoon when he wore the Elsinore and started the lee-shore drift.
+In which case it was a blunder.  The Samurai blundered, and his heart
+destroyed him when he became aware of the blunder.
+
+At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret's head.  She
+accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the
+oncoming termination of his sickness.  And no one will ever undeceive
+her.  Neither Mr. Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention
+a whisper of what so narrowly missed causing disaster.  In fact, Mr.
+Pike does not talk about the matter at all.--And then, again, might
+it not have been something different from heart disease?  Or heart
+disease complicated with something else that obscured his mind that
+afternoon before his death?  Well, no one knows, and I, for one,
+shall not sit, even in secret judgment, on the event.
+
+
+At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the Elsinore was
+rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of
+miles off the land.  Captain West was buried at four o'clock, and at
+eight bells that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few
+remarks to both watches.  They were straight-from-the-shoulder
+remarks, or, as he called them, they were "brass tacks."
+
+Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss,
+and that they would toe the mark as they never had before.  Up to
+this time they had been loafing in an hotel, but from this time on
+they were going to work.
+
+"On this hooker, from now on," he perorated, "it's going to be like
+old times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as well as
+the first.  And God help the man that don't jump.  That's all.
+Relieve the wheel and lookout."
+
+
+And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition.  I don't see how
+they can jump.  Another week of westerly gales, alternating with
+brief periods of calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off
+the Horn.  So weak are the men that they have no spirit left in them-
+-not even the gangsters.  And so afraid are they of the mate that
+they really do their best to jump when he drives them, and he drives
+them all the time.  Mr. Mellaire shakes his head.
+
+"Wait till they get around and up into better weather," he astonished
+me by telling me the other afternoon.  "Wait till they get dried out,
+and rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more
+flesh on their bones, and more spunk in their blood--then they won't
+stand for this driving.  Mr. Pike can't realize that times have
+changed, sir, and laws have changed, and men have changed.  He's an
+old man, and I know what I am talking about."
+
+"You mean you've been listening to the talk of the men?" I challenged
+rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this
+ship's officer.
+
+The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of
+light vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching,
+fearful thing that lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to
+leap out at me, while the cruel gash of mouth drew thinner and
+crueller.  And at the same time, on my inner sight, was grotesquely
+limned a picture of a brain pulsing savagely against the veneer of
+skin that covered that cleft of skull beneath the dripping sou'-
+wester.  Then he controlled himself, the mouth-gash relaxed, and the
+suave and gentle film drew again across the eyes.
+
+"I mean, sir," he said softly, "that I am speaking out of a long sea
+experience.  Times have changed.  The old driving days are gone.  And
+I trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the
+matter, nor misinterpret what I have said."
+
+Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I
+could not ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the
+talk of the men.  And yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is
+a good sailorman and second mate save for his unholy intimacy with
+the men for'ard--an intimacy which even the Chinese cook and the
+Chinese steward deplore as unseamanlike and perilous.
+
+Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that
+they have no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest
+for'ard who will not die, and who are as spunky as ever.  They are
+Andy Fay, Mulligan Jacobs, and Charles Davis.  What strange, abysmal
+vitality informs them is beyond all speculation.  Of course, Charles
+Davis should have been overside with a sack of coal at his feet long
+ago.  And Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only, and have always
+been, wrecked and emaciated wisps of men.  Yet far stronger men than
+they have gone over the side, and far stronger men than they are laid
+up right now in absolute physical helplessness in the soggy
+forecastle bunks.  And these two bitter flames of shreds of things
+stand all their watches and answer all calls for both watches.
+
+Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in
+them.  Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed
+dripping on occasion by the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight
+through canvas tarpaulins, nevertheless not a chicken has died.  Is
+it a matter of selection?  Are these the iron-vigoured ones that
+survived the hardships from Baltimore to the Horn, and are fitted to
+survive anything?  Then for a De Vries to take them, save them, and
+out of them found the hardiest breed of chickens on the planet!  And
+after this I shall always query that phrase, most ancient in our
+language--"chicken-hearted."  Measured by the Elsinore's chickens, it
+is a misnomer.
+
+Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
+topaz eyes, spunkless.  Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest
+of the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech,
+nevertheless they are good sailors and are always first to spring
+into any enterprise of work or peril.  They have gone into Mr.
+Mellaire's watch, and they are quite apart from the rest of the
+sailors.  And when there is a delay, or wait, with nothing to do for
+long minutes, they shoulder together, and stand and sway to the heave
+of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale, topaz eyes, of a
+country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes and sandy
+hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of topaz eyes
+and sandy hair.
+
+But the rest of the crew!  Take the Maltese Cockney.  He is too
+keenly intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure.
+He is a shadow of his former self.  His cheeks have fallen in.  Dark
+circles of suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and
+English intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as
+if aflame with fever.
+
+Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long
+tried and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit.  He is whining
+and fearful.  So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he
+is prideless and shameless.
+
+"I'll never ship around the Horn again, sir," he began on me the
+other day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel.  "I've sworn
+it before, but this time I mean it.  Never again, sir.  Never again."
+
+"Why did you swear it before?" I queried.
+
+"It was on the Nahoma, sir, four years ago.  Two hundred and thirty
+days from Liverpool to 'Frisco.  Think of it, sir.  Two hundred and
+thirty days!  And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
+creosote got loose.  We buried the captain right here off the Horn.
+The grub gave out.  Most of us nearly died of scurvy.  Every man Jack
+of us was carted to hospital in 'Frisco.  It was plain hell, sir,
+that's what it was, an' two hundred and thirty days of it."
+
+"Yet here you are," I laughed; "signed on another Horn voyage."
+
+And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
+
+"If only we'd lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney."
+
+I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered.  The
+carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with
+the winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.
+
+
+Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
+eternal buffeting by the Great West Wind.  Nor are we alone in our
+travail on this desolate ocean.  Never a day does the gray thin, or
+the snow-squalls cease that we do not sight ships, west-bound like
+ourselves, hove-to and trying to hold on to the meagre westing they
+possess.  And occasionally, when the gray clears and lifts, we see a
+lucky ship, bound east, running before it and reeling off the miles.
+I saw Mr. Pike, yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at
+one such craft that flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile
+away.
+
+And the men are jumping.  Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square
+fists of his, as many a man's face attests.  So weak are they, and so
+terrible is he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-
+handed.  I cannot help but note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take
+part in this driving.  Yet I know that he is a trained driver, and
+that he was not averse to driving at the outset of the voyage.  But
+now he seems bent on keeping on good terms with the crew.  I should
+like to know what Mr. Pike thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be
+blind to what is going on; but I am too well aware of what would
+happen if I raised the question.  He would insult me, snap my head
+off, and indulge in a three-days' sea-grouch.  Things are sad and
+monotonous enough for Margaret and me in the cabin and at table,
+without invoking the blight of the mate's displeasure.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+
+Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated.  From now on and for
+always these imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs.
+We are west of the Diego de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at
+a twelve-knot clip with an easterly gale at our backs.  And the
+carpenter is gone.  His passing, and the coming of the easterly wind,
+were coincidental.
+
+It was yesterday morning, as he helped me to dress, that I was struck
+by the solemnity of Wada's face.  He shook his head lugubriously as
+he broke the news.  The carpenter was missing.  The ship had been
+searched for him high and low.  There just was no carpenter.
+
+"What does the steward think?" I asked.  "What does Louis think?--and
+Yatsuda?"
+
+"The sailors, they kill 'm carpenter sure," was the answer.  "Very
+bad ship this.  Very bad hearts.  Just the same pig, just the same
+dog.  All the time kill.  All the time kill.  Bime-by everybody kill.
+You see."
+
+The old steward, at work in his pantry, grinned at me when I
+mentioned the matter.
+
+"They make fool with me, I fix 'em," he said vindictively.  "Mebbe
+they kill me, all right; but I kill some, too."
+
+He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his
+body, in a canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a
+meat knife of the heavy sort that butchers hack with.  He drew it
+forth- it was fully two feet long--and, to demonstrate its razor-
+edge, sliced a sheet of newspaper into many ribbons.
+
+"Huh!" he laughed sardonically.  "I am Chink, monkey, damn fool, eh?-
+-no good, eh? all rotten damn to hell.  I fix 'em, they make fool
+with me."
+
+And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play.  Nobody
+knows what happened to the carpenter.  There are no clues, no traces.
+The night was calm and snowy.  No seas broke on board.  Without doubt
+the clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and
+dead.  The question is:  did he go over of his own accord, or was he
+put over?
+
+At eight o'clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches.  He
+stood at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the
+rail and gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath
+him.
+
+Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story.
+They knew no more about it than did we--or so they averred.
+
+"I suppose you'll be chargin' next that I hove that big lummux
+overboard with me own hands," Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was
+questioned.  "An' mebbe I did, bein' that husky an' rampagin' bull-
+like."
+
+The mate's face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
+passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
+
+It was an unforgettable scene--the mate in the high place, the men,
+sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath.  A gentle snow drifted
+straight down through the windless air, while the Elsinore, with
+hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so
+that the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn,
+shuddering sucks and sobs.  And all the men swayed in unison to the
+rolls, their hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots,
+their faces worn and sick.  And the three dreamers with the topaz
+eyes stood and swayed and dreamed together, incurious of setting and
+situation.
+
+And then it came--the hint of easterly air.  The mate noted it first.
+I saw him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible
+draught.  Then I felt it.  A minute longer he waited, until assured,
+when, the dead carpenter forgotten, he burst out with orders to the
+wheel and the crew.  And the men jumped, though in their weakness the
+climb aloft was slow and toilsome; and when the gaskets were off the
+topgallant-sails and the men on deck were hoisting yards and sheeting
+home, those aloft were loosing the royals.
+
+While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced
+around, the Elsinore, her bow pointing to the west, began moving
+through the water before the first fair wind in a month and a half.
+
+Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time
+the snow fell steadily.  The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to
+fall, and the breeze continued to grow upon itself.  Tom Spink,
+passing by me on the poop to lend a hand at the final finicky
+trimming of the mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant look.
+Superstition was vindicated.  Events had proved him right.  Fair wind
+had come with the going of the carpenter, which said warlock had
+incontestably taken with him overside his bag of wind-tricks.
+
+Mr. Pike strode up and down the poop, rubbing his hands, which he was
+too disdainfully happy to mitten, chuckling and grinning to himself,
+glancing at the draw of every sail, stealing adoring looks astern
+into the gray of snow out of which blew the favouring wind.  He even
+paused beside me to gossip for a moment about the French restaurants
+of San Francisco and how, therein, the delectable California fashion
+of cooking wild duck obtained.
+
+"Throw 'em through the fire," he chanted.  "That's the way--throw 'em
+through the fire--a hot oven, sixteen minutes--I take mine fourteen,
+to the second--an' squeeze the carcasses."
+
+By midday the snow had ceased and we were bowling along before a
+stiff breeze.  At three in the afternoon we were running before a
+growing gale.  It was across a mad ocean we tore, for the mounting
+sea that made from eastward bucked into the West End Drift and
+battled and battered down the huge south-westerly swell.  And the big
+grinning dolt of a Finnish carpenter, already food for fish and bird,
+was astern there somewhere in the freezing rack and drive.
+
+Make westing!  We ripped it off across these narrowing degrees of
+longitude at the southern tip of the planet where one mile counts for
+two.  And Mr. Pike, staring at his bending topgallant-yards, swore
+that they could carry away for all he cared ere he eased an inch of
+canvas.  More he did.  He set the huge crojack, biggest of all sails,
+and challenged God or Satan to start a seam of it or all its seams.
+
+He simply could not go below.  In such auspicious occasions all
+watches were his, and he strode the poop perpetually with all age-lag
+banished from his legs.  Margaret and I were with him in the chart-
+room when he hurrahed the barometer, down to 28.55 and falling.  And
+we were near him, on the poop, when he drove by an east-bound lime-
+juicer, hove-to under upper-topsails.  We were a biscuit-toss away,
+and he sprang upon the rail at the jigger-shrouds and danced a war-
+dance and waved his free arm, and yelled his scorn and joy at their
+discomfiture to the several oilskinned figures on the stranger
+vessel's poop.
+
+Through the pitch-black night we continued to drive.  The crew was
+sadly frightened, and I sought in vain, in the two dog-watches, for
+Tom Spink, to ask him if he thought the carpenter, astern, had opened
+wide the bag-mouth and loosed all his tricks.  For the first time I
+saw the steward apprehensive.
+
+"Too much," he told me, with ominous rolling head.  "Too much sail,
+rotten bad damn all to hell.  Bime-by, pretty quick, all finish.  You
+see."
+
+"They talk about running the easting down," Mr. Pike chortled to me,
+as we clung to the poop-rail to keep from fetching away and breaking
+ribs and necks.  "Well, this is running your westing down if anybody
+should ride up in a go-devil and ask you."
+
+It was a wretched, glorious night.  Sleep was impossible--for me, at
+any rate.  Nor was there even the comfort of warmth.  Something had
+gone wrong with the big cabin stove, due to our wild running, I
+fancy, and the steward was compelled to let the fire go out.  So we
+are getting a taste of the hardship of the forecastle, though in our
+case everything is dry instead of soggy or afloat.  The kerosene
+stoves burned in our state room, but so smelly was mine that I
+preferred the cold.
+
+To sail on one's nerve in an over-canvassed harbour cat-boat is all
+the excitement any glutton can desire.  But to sail, in the same
+fashion, in a big ship off the Horn, is incredible and terrible.  The
+Great West Wind Drift, setting squarely into the teeth of the
+easterly gale, kicked up a tideway sea that was monstrous.  Two men
+toiled at the wheel, relieving in pairs every half-hour, and in the
+face of the cold they streamed with sweat long ere their half-hour
+shift was up.
+
+Mr. Pike is of the elder race of men.  His endurance is prodigious.
+Watch and watch, and all watches, he held the poop.
+
+"I never dreamed of it," he told me, at midnight, as the great gusts
+tore by and as we listened for our lighter spars to smash aloft and
+crash upon the deck.  "I thought my last whirling sailing was past.
+And here we are!  Here we are!
+
+"Lord!  Lord!  I sailed third mate in the little Vampire before you
+were born.  Fifty-six men before the mast, and the last Jack of 'em
+an able seaman.  And there were eight boys, an' bosuns that was
+bosuns, an' sail-makers an' carpenters an' stewards an' passengers to
+jam the decks.  An' three driving mates of us, an' Captain Brown, the
+Little Wonder.  He didn't weigh a hundredweight, an' he drove us--he
+drove US, three drivin' mates that learned from him what drivin' was.
+
+"It was knock down and drag out from the start.  The first hour of
+puttin' the men to fair perished our knuckles.  I've got the smashed
+joints yet to show.  Every sea-chest broke open, every sea-bag turned
+out, and whiskey bottles, knuckle-dusters, sling-shots, bowie-knives,
+an' guns chucked overside by the armful.  An' when we chose the
+watches, each man of fifty-six of 'em laid his knife on the main-
+hatch an' the carpenter broke the point square off.-Yes, an' the
+little Vampire only eight hundred tons.  The Elsinore could carry her
+on her deck.  But she was ship, all ship, an' them was men's days."
+
+Margaret, save for inability to sleep, did not mind the driving,
+although Mr. Mellaire, on the other hand, admitted apprehension.
+
+"He's got my goat," he confided to me.  "It isn't right to drive a
+cargo-carrier this way.  This isn't a ballasted yacht.  It's a coal-
+hulk.  I know what driving was, but it was in ships made to drive.
+Our iron-work aloft won't stand it.  Mr. Pathurst, I tell you frankly
+that it is criminal, it is sheer murder, to run the Elsinore with
+that crojack on her.  You can see yourself, sir.  It's an after-sail.
+All its tendency is to throw her stern off and her bow up to it.  And
+if it ever happens, sir, if she ever gets away from the wheel for two
+seconds and broaches to . . . "
+
+"Then what?" I asked, or, rather, shouted; for all conversation had
+to be shouted close to ear in that blast of gale.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and all of him was eloquent with the
+unuttered, unmistakable word-finish."
+
+At eight this morning Margaret and I struggled up to the poop.  And
+there was that indomitable, iron old man.  He had never left the deck
+all night.  His eyes were bright, and he appeared in the pink of
+well-being.  He rubbed his hands and chuckled greeting to us, and
+took up his reminiscences.
+
+"In '51, on this same stretch, Miss West, the Flying Cloud, in
+twenty-four hours, logged three hundred and seventy-four miles under
+her topgallant-sails.  That was sailing.  She broke the record, that
+day, for sail an' steam."
+
+"And what are we averaging, Mr. Pike?" Margaret queried, while her
+eyes were fixed on the main deck, where continually one rail and then
+the other dipped under the ocean and filled across from rail to rail,
+only to spill out and take in on the next roll.
+
+"Thirteen for a fair average since five o'clock yesterday afternoon,"
+he exulted.  "In the squalls she makes all of sixteen, which is going
+some, for the Elsinore."
+
+"I'd take the crojack off if I had charge," Margaret criticised.
+
+"So would I, so would I, Miss West," he replied; "if we hadn't been
+six weeks already off the Horn."
+
+She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel
+to the wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some
+invisible archer's hands.
+
+"They're remarkably good sticks of timber," was her comment.
+
+"Well may you say it, Miss West," he agreed.  "I'd never a-believed
+they'd a-stood it myself.  But just look at 'm!  Just look at 'm!"
+
+There was no breakfast for the men.  Three times the galley had been
+washed out, and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented
+themselves with hard tack and cold salt horse.  Aft, with us, the
+steward scalded himself twice ere he succeeded in making coffee over
+a kerosene-burner.
+
+At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the
+same direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail.  The only
+one of her courses set was the foresail.
+
+The way that skipper's carryin' on is shocking," Mr. Pike sneered.
+"He should be more cautious, and remember God, the owners, the
+underwriters, and the Board of Trade."
+
+Such was our speed that in almost no time we were up with the
+stranger vessel and passing her.  Mr. Pike was like a boy just loosed
+from school.  He altered our course so that we passed her a hundred
+yards away.  She was a gallant sight, but, such was our speed, she
+appeared standing still.  Mr. Pike jumped upon the rail and insulted
+those on her poop by extending a rope's end in invitation to take a
+tow.
+
+Margaret shook her head privily to me as she gazed at our bending
+royal-yards, but was caught in the act by Mr. Pike, who cried out:
+
+"What kites she won't carry she can drag!"
+
+An hour later I caught Tom Spink, just relieved from his shift at the
+wheel and weak from exhaustion.
+
+"What do you think now of the carpenter and his bag of tricks?"  I
+queried.
+
+"Lord lumme, it should a-ben the mate, sir," was his reply.
+
+By five in the afternoon we had logged 314 miles since five the
+previous day, which was two over an average of thirteen knots for
+twenty-four consecutive hours.
+
+"Now take Captain Brown of the little Vampire," Mr. Pike grinned to
+me, for our sailing made him good-natured.  "He never would take in
+until the kites an' stu'n'sails was about his ears.  An' when she was
+blown' her worst an' we was half-fairly shortened down, he'd turn in
+for a snooze, an' say to us, 'Call me if she moderates.'  Yes, and
+I'll never forget the night when I called him an' told him that
+everything on top the houses had gone adrift, an' that two of the
+boats had been swept aft and was kindling-wood against the break of
+the cabin.  'Very well, Mr. Pike,' he says, battin' his eyes and
+turnin' over to go to sleep again.  'Very well, Mr. Pike,' says he.
+'Watch her.  An' Mr. Pike . . .' 'Yes, sir,' says I.  'Give me a
+call, Mr. Pike, when the windlass shows signs of comin' aft.'  That's
+what he said, his very words, an' the next moment, damme, he was
+snorin'."
+
+
+It is now midnight, and, cunningly wedged into my bunk, unable to
+sleep, I am writing these lines with flying dabs of pencil at my pad.
+And no more shall I write, I swear, until this gale is blown out, or
+we are blown to Kingdom Come.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+
+The days have passed and I have broken my resolve; for here I am
+again writing while the Elsinore surges along across a magnificent,
+smoky, dusty sea.  But I have two reasons for breaking my word.
+First, and minor, we had a real dawn this morning.  The gray of the
+sea showed a streaky blue, and the cloud-masses were actually pink-
+tipped by a really and truly sun.
+
+Second, and major, WE ARE AROUND THE HORN!  We are north of 50 in the
+Pacific, in Longitude 80.49, with Cape Pillar and the Straits of
+Magellan already south of east from us, and we are heading north-
+north-west.  WE ARE AROUND THE HORN!  The profound significance of
+this can be appreciated only by one who has wind-jammed around from
+east to west.  Blow high, blow low, nothing can happen to thwart us.
+No ship north of 50 was ever blown back.  From now on it is plain
+sailing, and Seattle suddenly seems quite near.
+
+All the ship's company, with the exception of Margaret, is better
+spirited.  She is quiet, and a little down, though she is anything
+but prone to the wastage of grief.  In her robust, vital philosophy
+God's always in heaven.  I may describe her as being merely subdued,
+and gentle, and tender.  And she is very wistful to receive gentle
+consideration and tenderness from me.  She is, after all, the genuine
+woman.  She wants the strength that man has to give, and I flatter
+myself that I am ten times a stronger man than I was when the voyage
+began, because I am a thousand times a more human man since I told
+the books to go hang and began to revel in the human maleness of the
+man that loves a woman and is loved.
+
+Returning to the ship's company.  The rounding of the Horn, the
+better weather that is continually growing better, the easement of
+hardship and toil and danger, with the promise of the tropics and of
+the balmy south-east trades before them--all these factors contribute
+to pick up our men again.  The temperature has already so moderated
+that the men are beginning to shed their surplusage of clothing, and
+they no longer wrap sacking about their sea-boots.  Last evening, in
+the second dog-watch, I heard a man actually singing.
+
+The steward has discarded the huge, hacking knife and relaxed to the
+extent of engaging in an occasional sober romp with Possum.  Wada's
+face is no longer solemnly long, and Louis' Oxford accent is more
+mellifluous than ever.  Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay are the same
+venomous scorpions they have always been.  The three gangsters, with
+the clique they lead, have again asserted their tyrrany and thrashed
+all the weaklings and feeblings in the forecastle.  Charles Davis
+resolutely refuses to die, though how he survived that wet and
+freezing room of iron through all the weeks off the Horn has elicited
+wonder even from Mr. Pike, who has a most accurate knowledge of what
+men can stand and what they cannot stand.
+
+How Nietzsche, with his eternal slogan of "Be hard!  Be hard!" would
+have delighted in Mr. Pike!
+
+And--oh!--Larry has had a tooth removed.  For some days distressed
+with a jumping toothache, he came aft to the mate for relief.  Mr.
+Pike refused to "monkey" with the "fangled" forceps in the medicine-
+chest.  He used a tenpenny nail and a hammer in the good old way to
+which he was brought up.  I vouch for this.  I saw it done.  One blow
+of the hammer and the tooth was out, while Larry was jumping around
+holding his jaw.  It is a wonder it wasn't fractured.  But Mr. Pike
+avers he has removed hundreds of teeth by this method and never known
+a fractured jaw.  Also, he avers he once sailed with a skipper who
+shaved every Sunday morning and never touched a razor, nor any
+cutting-edge, to his face.  What he used, according to Mr. Pike, was
+a lighted candle and a damp towel.  Another candidate for Nietzsche's
+immortals who are hard!
+
+As for Mr. Pike himself, he is the highest-spirited, best-conditioned
+man on board.  The driving to which he subjected the Elsinore was
+meat and drink.  He still rubs his hands and chuckles over the memory
+of it.
+
+"Huh!" he said to me, in reference to the crew; "I gave 'em a taste
+of real old-fashioned sailing.  They'll never forget this hooker--at
+least them that don't take a sack of coal overside before we reach
+port."
+
+"You mean you think we'll have more sea-burials?" I inquired.
+
+He turned squarely upon me, and squarely looked me in the eyes for
+the matter of five long seconds.
+
+"Huh!" he replied, as he turned on his heel.  "Hell ain't begun to
+pop on this hooker."
+
+He still stands his mate's watch, alternating with Mr. Mellaire, for
+he is firm in his conviction that there is no man for'ard fit to
+stand a second mate's watch.  Also, he has kept his old quarters.
+Perhaps it is out of delicacy for Margaret; for I have learned that
+it is the invariable custom for the mate to occupy the captain's
+quarters when the latter dies.  So Mr. Mellaire still eats by himself
+in the big after-room, as he has done since the loss of the
+carpenter, and bunks as before in the 'midship-house with Nancy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+
+Mr. Mellaire was right.  The men would not accept the driving when
+the Elsinore won to easier latitudes.  Mr. Pike was right.  Hell had
+not begun to pop.  But it has popped now, and men are overboard
+without even the kindliness of a sack of coal at their feet.  And yet
+the men, though ripe for it, did not precipitate the trouble.  It was
+Mr. Mellaire.  Or, rather, it was Ditman Olansen, the crank-eyed
+Norwegian.  Perhaps it was Possum.  At any rate, it was an accident,
+in which the several-named, including Possum, played their respective
+parts.
+
+To begin at the beginning.  Two weeks have elapsed since we crossed
+50, and we are now in 37--the same latitude as San Francisco, or, to
+be correct, we are as far south of the equator as San Francisco is
+north of it.  The trouble was precipitated yesterday morning shortly
+after nine o'clock, and Possum started the chain of events that
+culminated in downright mutiny.  It was Mr. Mellaire's watch, and he
+was standing on the bridge, directly under the mizzen-top, giving
+orders to Sundry Buyers, who, with Arthur Deacon and the Maltese
+Cockney, was doing rigging work aloft.
+
+Get the picture and the situation in all its ridiculousness.  Mr.
+Pike, thermometer in hand, was coming back along the bridge from
+taking the temperature of the coal in the for'ard hold.  Ditman
+Olansen was just swinging into the mizzen-top as he went up with
+several turns of rope over one shoulder.  Also, in some way, to the
+end of this rope was fastened a sizable block that might have weighed
+ten pounds.  Possum, running free, was fooling around the chicken-
+coop on top the 'midship-house.  And the chickens, featherless but
+indomitable, were enjoying the milder weather as they pecked at the
+grain and grits which the steward had just placed in their feeding-
+trough.  The tarpaulin that covered their pen had been off for
+several days.
+
+Now observe.  I am at the break of the poop, leaning on the rail and
+watching Ditman Olansen swing into the top with his cumbersome
+burden.  Mr. Pike, proceeding aft, has just passed Mr. Mellaire.
+Possum, who, on account of the Horn weather and the tarpaulin, has
+not seen the chickens for many weeks, is getting reacquainted, and is
+investigating them with that keen nose of his.  And a hen's beak,
+equally though differently keen, impacts on Possum's nose, which is
+as sensitive as it is keen.
+
+I may well say, now that I think it over, that it was this particular
+hen that started the mutiny.  The men, well-driven by Mr. Pike, were
+ripe for an explosion, and Possum and the hen laid the train.
+
+Possum fell away backwards from the coop and loosed a wild cry of
+pain and indignation.  This attracted Ditman Olansen's attention.  He
+paused and craned his neck out in order to see, and, in this moment
+of carelessness, the block he was carrying fetched away from him
+along with the several turns of rope around his shoulder.  Both the
+mates sprang away to get out from under.  The rope, fast to the block
+and following it, lashed about like a blacksnake, and, though the
+block fell clear of Mr. Mellaire, the bight of the rope snatched off
+his cap.
+
+Mr. Pike had already started an oath aloft when his eyes caught sight
+of the terrible cleft in Mr. Mellaire's head.  There it was, for all
+the world to read, and Mr. Pike's and mine were the only eyes that
+could read it.  The sparse hair upon the second mate's crown served
+not at all to hide the cleft.  It began out of sight in the thicker
+hair above the ears, and was exposed nakedly across the whole dome of
+head.
+
+The stream of abuse for Ditman Olansen was choked in Mr. Pike's
+throat.  All he was capable of for the moment was to stare,
+petrified, at that enormous fissure flanked at either end with a
+thatch of grizzled hair.  He was in a dream, a trance, his great
+hands knotting and clenching unconsciously as he stared at the mark
+unmistakable by which he had said that he would some day identify the
+murderer of Captain Somers.  And in that moment I remembered having
+heard him declare that some day he would stick his fingers in that
+mark.
+
+Still as in a dream, moving slowly, right hand outstretched like a
+talon, with the fingers drawn downward, he advanced on the second
+mate with the evident intention of thrusting his fingers into that
+cleft and of clawing and tearing at the brain-life beneath that
+pulsed under the thin film of skin.
+
+The second mate backed away along the bridge, and Mr. Pike seemed
+partially to come to himself.  His outstretched arm dropped to his
+side, and he paused.
+
+"I know you," he said, in a strange, shaky voice, blended of age and
+passion.  "Eighteen years ago you were dismasted off the Plate in the
+Cyrus Thompson.  She foundered, after you were on your beam ends and
+lost your sticks.  You were in the only boat that was saved.  Eleven
+years ago, on the Jason Harrison, in San Francisco, Captain Somers
+was beaten to death by his second mate.  This second mate was a
+survivor of the Cyrus Thompson.  This second mate'd had his skull
+split by a crazy sea-cook.  Your skull is split.  This second mate's
+name was Sidney Waltham.  And if you ain't Sidney Waltham . . . "
+
+At this point Mr. Mellaire, or, rather, Sidney Waltham, despite his
+fifty years, did what only a sailor could do.  He went over the
+bridge-rail side-wise, caught the running gear up-and-down the
+mizzen-mast, and landed lightly on his feet on top of Number Three
+hatch.  Nor did he stop there.  He ran across the hatch and dived
+through the doorway of his room in the 'midship-house.
+
+Such must have been Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused
+like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his
+hand, and seemed to awaken.
+
+But the second mate had not run to his room for refuge.  The next
+moment he emerged, a thirty-two Smith and Wesson in his hand, and the
+instant he emerged he began shooting.
+
+Mr. Pike was wholly himself again, and I saw him perceptibly pause
+and decide between the two impulses that tore at him.  One was to
+leap over the bridge-rail and down at the man who shot at him; the
+other was to retreat.  He retreated.  And as he bounded aft along the
+narrow bridge the mutiny began.  Arthur Deacon, from the mizzen-top,
+leaned out and hurled a steel marlin-spike at the fleeing mate.  The
+thing flashed in the sunlight as it hurtled down.  It missed Mr. Pike
+by twenty feet and nearly impaled Possum, who, afraid of firearms,
+was wildly rushing and ki-yi-ing aft.  It so happened that the sharp
+point of the marlin-spike struck the wooden floor of the bridge, and
+it penetrated the planking with such force that after it had fetched
+to a standstill it vibrated violently for long seconds.
+
+I confess that I failed to observe a tithe of what occurred during
+the next several minutes.  Piece together as I will, after the event,
+I know that I missed much of what took place.  I know that the men
+aloft in the mizzen descended to the deck, but I never saw them
+descend.  I know that the second mate emptied the chambers of his
+revolver, but I did not hear all the shots.  I know that Lars Johnson
+left the wheel, and on his broken leg, rebroken and not yet really
+mended, limped and scuttled across the poop, down the ladder, and
+gained for'ard.  I know he must have limped and scuttled on that bad
+leg of his; I know that I must have seen him; and yet I swear that I
+have no impression of seeing him.
+
+I do know that I heard the rush of feet of men from for'ard along the
+main deck.  And I do know that I saw Mr. Pike take shelter behind the
+steel jiggermast.  Also, as the second mate manoeuvred to port on top
+of Number Three hatch for his last shot, I know that I saw Mr. Pike
+duck around the corner of the chart-house to starboard and get away
+aft and below by way of the booby-hatch.  And I did hear that last
+futile shot, and the bullet also as it ricochetted from the corner of
+the steel-walled chart-house.
+
+As for myself, I did not move.  I was too interested in seeing.  It
+may have been due to lack of presence of mind, or to lack of
+habituation to an active part in scenes of quick action; but at any
+rate I merely retained my position at the break of the poop and
+looked on.  I was the only person on the poop when the mutineers, led
+by the second mate and the gangsters, rushed it.  I saw them swarm up
+the ladder, and it never entered my head to attempt to oppose them.
+Which was just as well, for I would have been killed for my pains,
+and I could never have stopped them.
+
+I was alone on the poop, and the men were quite perplexed to find no
+enemy in sight.  As Bert Rhine went past, he half fetched up in his
+stride, as if to knife me with the sheath knife, sharp-pointed, which
+he carried in his right hand; then, and I know I correctly measured
+the drift of his judgment, he unflatteringly dismissed me as
+unimportant and ran on.
+
+Right here I was impressed by the lack of clear-thinking on any of
+their parts.  So spontaneously had the ship's company exploded into
+mutiny that it was dazed and confused even while it acted.  For
+instance, in the months since we left Baltimore there had never been
+a moment, day or night, even when preventer tackles were rigged, that
+a man had not stood at the wheel.  So habituated were they to this,
+that they were shocked into consternation at sight of the deserted
+wheel.  They paused for an instant to stare at it.  Then Bert Rhine,
+with a quick word and gesture, sent the Italian, Guido Bombini,
+around the rear of the half-wheelhouse.  The fact that he completed
+the circuit was proof that nobody was there.
+
+Again, in the swift rush of events, I must confess that I saw but
+little.  I was aware that more of the men were climbing up the ladder
+and gaining the poop, but I had no eyes for them.  I was watching
+that sanguinary group aft near the wheel and noting the most
+important thing, namely, that it was Bert Rhine, the gangster, and
+not the second mate, who gave orders and was obeyed.
+
+He motioned to the Jew, Isaac Chantz, who had been wounded earlier in
+the voyage by O'Sullivan, and Chantz led the way to the starboard
+chart-house door.  While this was going on, all in flashing fractions
+of seconds, Bert Rhine was cautiously inspecting the lazarette
+through the open booby-hatch.
+
+Isaac Chantz jerked open the chart-house door, which swung outward.
+Things did happen so swiftly!  As he jerked the iron door open a two-
+foot hacking butcher knife, at the end of a withered, yellow hand,
+flashed out and down on him.  It missed head and neck, but caught him
+on top of the left shoulder.
+
+All hands recoiled before this, and the Jew reeled across to the
+rail, his right hand clutching at his wound, and between the fingers
+I could see the blood welling darkly.  Bert Rhine abandoned his
+inspection of the booby-hatch, and, with the second mate, the latter
+still carrying his empty Smith & Wesson, sprang into the press about
+the chart-house door.
+
+O wise, clever, cautious, old Chinese steward!  He made no emergence.
+The door swung emptily back and forth to the rolling of the Elsinore,
+and no man knew but what, just inside, with that heavy, hacking knife
+upraised, lurked the steward.  And while they hesitated and stared at
+the aperture that alternately closed and opened with the swinging of
+the door, the booby-hatch, situated between chart-house and wheel,
+erupted.  It was Mr. Pike, with his .44 automatic Colt.
+
+There were shots fired, other than by him.  I know I heard them, like
+"red-heads" at an old-time Fourth of July; but I do not know who
+discharged them.  All was mess and confusion.  Many shots were being
+fired, and through the uproar I heard the reiterant, monotonous
+explosions from the Colt's .44
+
+I saw the Italian, Mike Cipriani, clutch savagely at his abdomen and
+sink slowly to the deck.  Shorty, the Japanese half-caste, clown that
+he was, dancing and grinning on the outskirts of the struggle, with a
+final grimace and hysterical giggle led the retreat across the poop
+and down the poop-ladder.  Never had I seen a finer exemplification
+of mob psychology.  Shorty, the most unstable-minded of the
+individuals who composed this mob, by his own instability
+precipitated the retreat in which the mob joined.  When he broke
+before the steady discharge of the automatic in the hand of the mate,
+on the instant the rest broke with him.  Least-balanced, his balance
+was the balance of all of them.
+
+Chantz, bleeding prodigiously, was one of the first on Shorty's
+heels.  I saw Nosey Murphy pause long enough to throw his knife at
+the mate.  The missile went wide, with a metallic clang struck the
+brass tip of one of the spokes of the Elsinore's wheel, and clattered
+on the deck.  The second mate, with his empty revolver, and Bert
+Rhine with his sheath-knife, fled past me side by side.
+
+Mr. Pike emerged from the booby-hatch and with an unaimed shot
+brought down Bill Quigley, one of the "bricklayers," who fell at my
+feet.  The last man off the poop was the Maltese Cockney, and at the
+top of the ladder he paused to look back at Mr. Pike, who, holding
+the automatic in both hands, was taking careful aim.  The Maltese
+Cockney, disdaining the ladder, leaped through the air to the main
+deck.  But the Colt merely clicked.  It was the last bullet in it
+that had fetched down Bill Quigley.
+
+And the poop was ours.
+
+Events still crowded so closely that I missed much.  I saw the
+steward, belligerent and cautious, his long knife poised for a slash,
+emerge from the chart-house.  Margaret followed him, and behind her
+came Wada, who carried my .22 Winchester automatic rifle.  As he told
+me afterwards, he had brought it up under instructions from her.
+
+Mr. Pike was glancing with cool haste at his Colt to see whether it
+was jammed or empty, when Margaret asked him the course.
+
+"By the wind," he shouted to her, as he bounded for'ard.  "Put your
+helm hard up or we'll be all aback."
+
+Ah!--yeoman and henchman of the race, he could not fail in his
+fidelity to the ship under his command.  The iron of all his years of
+iron training was there manifest.  While mutiny spread red, and death
+was on the wing, he could not forget his charge, the ship, the
+Elsinore, the insensate fabric compounded of steel and hemp and woven
+cotton that was to him glorious with personality.
+
+Margaret waved Wada in my direction as she ran to the wheel.  As Mr.
+Pike passed the corner of the chart-house, simultaneously there was a
+report from amidships and the ping of a bullet against the steel
+wall.  I saw the man who fired the shot.  It was the cowboy, Steve
+Roberts.
+
+As for the mate, he ducked in behind the sheltering jiggermast, and
+even as he ducked his left hand dipped into his side coat-pocket, so
+that when he had gained shelter it was coming out with a fresh clip
+of cartridges.  The empty clip fell to the deck, the loader clip
+slipped up the hollow butt, and he was good for eight more shots.
+
+Wada turned the little automatic rifle over to me, where I still
+stood under the weather cloth at the break of the poop.
+
+"All ready," he said.  "You take off safety."
+
+"Get Roberts," Mr. Pike called to me.  "He's the best shot for'ard.
+If you can't get 'm, jolt the fear of God into him anyway."
+
+It was the first time I had a human target, and let me say, here and
+now, that I am convinced I am immune to buck fever.  There he was
+before me, less than a hundred feet distant, in the gangway between
+the door to Davis' room and the starboard-rail, manoeuvring for
+another shot at Mr. Pike.
+
+I must have missed Steve Roberts that first time, but I came so near
+him that he jumped.  The next instant he had located me and turned
+his revolver on me.  But he had no chance.  My little automatic was
+discharging as fast as I could tickle the trigger with my fore-
+finger.  The cowboy's first shot went wild of me, because my bullet
+arrived ere he got his swift aim.  He swayed and stumbled backward,
+but the bullets--ten of them--poured from the muzzle of my Winchester
+like water from a garden hose.  It was a stream of lead I played upon
+him.  I shall never know how many times I hit him, but I am confident
+that after he had begun his long staggering fall at least three
+additional bullets entered him ere he impacted on the deck.  And even
+as he was falling, aimlessly and mechanically, stricken then with
+death, he managed twice again to discharge his weapon.
+
+And after he struck the deck he never moved.  I do believe he died in
+the air.
+
+As I held up my gun and gazed at the abruptly-deserted main-deck I
+was aware of Wada's touch on my arm.  I looked.  In his hand were a
+dozen little .22 long, soft-nosed, smokeless cartridges.  He wanted
+me to reload.  I threw on the safety, opened the magazine, and tilted
+the rifle so that he could let the fresh cartridges of themselves
+slide into place.
+
+"Get some more," I told him.
+
+Scarcely had he departed on the errand when Bill Quigley, who lay at
+my feet, created a diversion.  I jumped--yes, and I freely confess
+that I yelled--with startle and surprise, when I felt his paws clutch
+my ankles and his teeth shut down on the calf of my leg.
+
+It was Mr. Pike to the rescue.  I understand now the Western
+hyperbole of "hitting the high places."  The mate did not seem in
+contact with the deck.  My impression was that he soared through the
+air to me, landing beside me, and, in the instant of landing, kicking
+out with one of those big feet of his.  Bill Quigley was kicked clear
+away from me, and the next moment he was flying overboard.  It was a
+clean throw.  He never touched the rail.
+
+Whether Mike Cipriani, who, till then, had lain in a welter, began
+crawling aft in quest of safety, or whether he intended harm to
+Margaret at the wheel, we shall never know; for there was no
+opportunity given him to show his purpose.  As swiftly as Mr. Pike
+could cross the deck with those giant bounds, just that swiftly was
+the Italian in the air and following Bill Quigley overside.
+
+The mate missed nothing with those eagle eyes of his as he returned
+along the poop.  Nobody was to be seen on the main deck.  Even the
+lookout had deserted the forecastle-head, and the Elsinore, steered
+by Margaret, slipped a lazy two knots through the quiet sea.  Mr.
+Pike was apprehensive of a shot from ambush, and it was not until
+after a scrutiny of several minutes that he put his pistol into his
+side coat-pocket and snarled for'ard:
+
+"Come out, you rats!  Show your ugly faces!  I want to talk with
+you!"
+
+Guido Bombini, gesticulating peaceable intentions and evidently
+thrust out by Bert Rhine, was the first to appear.  When it was
+observed that Mr. Pike did not fire, the rest began to dribble into
+view.  This continued till all were there save the cook, the two
+sail-makers, and the second mate.  The last to come out were Tom
+Spink, the boy Buckwheat, and Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured
+but simple-minded German; and these three came out only after
+repeated threats from Bert Rhine, who, with Nosey Murphy and Kid
+Twist, was patently in charge.  Also, like a faithful dog, Guido
+Bombini fawned close to him.
+
+"That will do--stop where you are," Mr. Pike commanded, when the crew
+was scattered abreast, to starboard and to port, of Number Three
+hatch.
+
+It was a striking scene.  MUTINY ON THE HIGH SEAS!  That phrase,
+learned in boyhood from my Marryatt and Cooper, recrudesced in my
+brain.  This was it--mutiny on the high seas in the year nineteen
+thirteen--and I was part of it, a perishing blond whose lot was cast
+with the perishing but lordly blonds, and I had already killed a man.
+
+Mr. Pike, in the high place, aged and indomitable; leaned his arm on
+the rail at the break of the poop and gazed down at the mutineers,
+the like of which I'll wager had never been assembled in mutiny
+before.  There were the three gangsters and ex-jailbirds, anything
+but seamen, yet in control of this affair that was peculiarly an
+affair of the sea.  With them was the Italian hound, Bombini, and
+beside them were such strangely assorted men as Anton Sorensen, Lars
+Jacobsen, Frank Fitzgibbon, and Richard Giller--also Arthur Deacon
+the white slaver, John Hackey the San Francisco hoodlum, the Maltese
+Cockney, and Tony the suicidal Greek.
+
+I noticed the three strange ones, shouldering together and standing
+apart from the others as they swayed to the lazy roll and dreamed
+with their pale, topaz eyes.  And there was the Faun, stone deaf but
+observant, straining to understand what was taking place.  Yes, and
+Mulligan Jacobs and Andy Fay were bitterly and eagerly side by side,
+and Ditman Olansen, crank-eyed, as if drawn by some affinity of
+bitterness, stood behind them, his head appearing between their
+heads.  Farthest advanced of all was Charles Davis, the man who by
+all rights should long since be dead, his face with its wax-like
+pallor startlingly in contrast to the weathered faces of the rest.
+
+I glanced back at Margaret, who was coolly steering, and she smiled
+to me, and love was in her eyes--she, too, of the perishing and
+lordly race of blonds, her place the high place, her heritage
+government and command and mastery over the stupid lowly of her kind
+and over the ruck and spawn of the dark-pigmented breeds.
+
+"Where's Sidney Waltham?" the mate snarled.  "I want him.  Bring him
+out.  After that, the rest of you filth get back to work, or God have
+mercy on you."
+
+The men moved about restlessly, shuffling their feet on the deck.
+
+"Sidney Waltham, I want you--come out!" Mr. Pike called, addressing
+himself beyond them to the murderer of the captain under whom once he
+had sailed.
+
+The prodigious old hero!  It never entered his head that he was not
+the master of the rabble there below him.  He had but one idea, an
+idea of passion, and that was his desire for vengeance on the
+murderer of his old skipper.
+
+"You old stiff!" Mulligan Jacobs snarled back.
+
+"Shut up, Mulligan!" was Bert Rhine's command, in receipt of which he
+received a venomous stare from the cripple.
+
+"Oh, ho, my hearty," Mr. Pike sneered at the gangster.  "I'll take
+care of your case, never fear.  In the meantime, and right now, fetch
+out that dog."
+
+Whereupon he ignored the leader of the mutineers and began calling,
+"Waltham, you dog, come out!  Come out, you sneaking cur!  Come out!"
+
+ANOTHER LUNATIC, was the thought that flashed through my mind;
+another lunatic, the slave of a single idea.  He forgets the mutiny,
+his fidelity to the ship, in his personal thirst for vengeance.
+
+But did he?  Even as he forgot and called his heart's desire, which
+was the life of the second mate, even then, without intention,
+mechanically, his sailor's considerative eye lifted to note the draw
+of the sails and roved from sail to sail.  Thereupon, so reminded, he
+returned to his fidelity.
+
+"Well?" he snarled at Bert Rhine.  "Go on and get for'ard before I
+spit on you, you scum and slum.  I'll give you and the rest of the
+rats two minutes to return to duty."
+
+And the leader, with his two fellow-gangsters, laughed their weird,
+silent laughter.
+
+"I guess you'll listen to our talk, first, old horse," Bert Rhine
+retorted.  "--Davis, get up now and show what kind of a spieler you
+are.  Don't get cold feet.  Spit it out to Foxy Grandpa an' tell 'm
+what's doin'."
+
+"You damned sea-lawyer!" Mr. Pike snarled as Davis opened his mouth
+to speak.
+
+Bert Rhine shrugged his shoulders, and half turned on his heel as if
+to depart, as he said quietly:
+
+"Oh, well, if you don't want to talk . . . "
+
+Mr. Pike conceded a point.
+
+"Go on!" he snarled.  "Spit the dirt out of your system, Davis; but
+remember one thing:  you'll pay for this, and you'll pay through the
+nose.  Go on!"
+
+The sea-lawyer cleared his throat in preparation.
+
+"First of all, I ain't got no part in this," he began.
+
+"I'm a sick man, an' I oughta be in my bunk right now.  I ain't fit
+to be on my feet.  But they've asked me to advise 'em on the law, an'
+I have advised 'em--"
+
+"And the law--what is it?" Mr. Pike broke in.
+
+But Davis was uncowed.
+
+"The law is that when the officers is inefficient, the crew can take
+charge peaceably an' bring the ship into port.  It's all law an' in
+the records.  There was the Abyssinia, in eighteen ninety-two, when
+the master'd died of fever and the mates took to drinkin'--"Go on!"
+Mr. Pike shut him off.  "I don't want your citations.  What d'ye
+want?  Spit it out."
+
+"Well--and I'm talkin' as an outsider, as a sick man off duty that's
+been asked to talk--well, the point is our skipper was a good one,
+but he's gone.  Our mate is violent, seekin' the life of the second
+mate.  We don't care about that.  What we want is to get into port
+with our lives.  An' our lives is in danger.  We ain't hurt nobody.
+You've done all the bloodshed.  You've shot an' killed an' thrown two
+men overboard, as witnesses'll testify to in court.  An' there's
+Roberts, there, dead, too, an' headin' for the sharks--an' what for?
+For defendin' himself from murderous an' deadly attack, as every man
+can testify an' tell the truth, the whole truth, an' nothin' but the
+truth, so help 'm, God--ain't that right, men?"
+
+A confused murmur of assent arose from many of them.
+
+"You want my job, eh?" Mr. Pike grinned.  "An' what are you goin' to
+do with me?"
+
+"You'll be taken care of until we get in an' turn you over to the
+lawful authorities," Davis answered promptly.  "Most likely you can
+plead insanity an' get off easy."
+
+At this moment I felt a stir at my shoulder.  It was Margaret, armed
+with the long knife of the steward, whom she had put at the wheel.
+
+"You've got another guess comin', Davis," Mr. Pike said.  "I've got
+no more talk with you.  I'm goin' to talk to the bunch.  I'll give
+you fellows just two minutes to choose, and I'll tell you your
+choices.  You've only got two choices.  You'll turn the second mate
+over to me an' go back to duty and take what's comin' to you, or
+you'll go to jail with the stripes on you for long sentences.  You've
+got two minutes.  The fellows that want jail can stand right where
+they are.  The fellows that don't want jail and are willin' to work
+faithful, can walk right back to me here on the poop.  Two minutes,
+an' you can keep your jaws stopped while you think over what it's
+goin' to be."
+
+He turned his head to me and said in an undertone, "Be ready with
+that pop-gun for trouble.  An' don't hesitate.  Slap it into 'em--the
+swine that think they can put as raw a deal as this over on us."
+
+It was Buckwheat who made the first move; but so tentative was it
+that it got no farther than a tensing of the legs and a sway forward
+of the shoulders.  Nevertheless it was sufficient to start Herman
+Lunkenheimer, who thrust out his foot and began confidently to walk
+aft.  Kid Twist gained him in a single spring, and Kid Twist, his
+wrist under the German's throat from behind; his knee pressed into
+the German's back, bent the man backward and held him.  Even as the
+rifle came to my shoulder, the hound Bombini drew his knife directly
+beneath Kid Twist's wrist across the up-stretched throat of the man.
+
+It was at this instant that I heard Mr. Pike's "Plug him!" and pulled
+the trigger; and of all ungodly things the bullet missed and caught
+the Faun, who staggered back, sat down on the hatch, and began to
+cough.  And even as he coughed he still strained with pain-eloquent
+eyes to try to understand.
+
+No other man moved.  Herman Lunkenheimer, released by Kid Twist, sank
+down on the deck.  Nor did I shoot again.  Kid Twist stood again by
+the side of Bert Rhine and Guido Bombini fawned near.
+
+Bert Rhine actually visibly smiled.
+
+"Any more of you guys want to promenade aft?" he queried in velvet
+tones.
+
+"Two minutes up," Mr. Pike declared.
+
+"An' what are you goin' to do about it, Grandpa?" Bert Rhine sneered.
+
+In a flash the big automatic was out of the mate's pocket and he was
+shooting as fast as he could pull trigger, while all hands fled to
+shelter.  But, as he had long since told me, he was no shot and could
+effectively use the weapon only at close range--muzzle to stomach
+preferably.
+
+As we stared at the main deck, deserted save for the dead cowboy on
+his back and for the Faun who still sat on the hatch and coughed, an
+eruption of men occurred over the for'ard edge of the 'midship-house.
+
+"Shoot!" Margaret cried at my back.
+
+"Don't!" Mr. Pike roared at me.
+
+The rifle was at my shoulder when I desisted.  Louis, the cook, led
+the rush aft to us across the top of the house and along the bridge.
+Behind him, in single file and not wasting any time, came the
+Japanese sail-makers, Henry the training-ship boy, and the other boy
+Buckwheat.  Tom Spink brought up the rear.  As he came up the ladder
+of the 'midship-house somebody from beneath must have caught him by a
+leg in an effort to drag him back.  We saw half of him in sight and
+knew that he was struggling and kicking.  He fetched clear abruptly,
+gained the top of the house in a surge, and raced aft along the
+bridge until he overtook and collided with Buckwheat, who yelled out
+in fear that a mutineer had caught him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+
+We who are aft, besieged in the high place, are stronger in numbers
+than I dreamed until now, when I have just finished taking the ship's
+census.  Of course Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself are apart.  We
+alone represent the ruling class.  With us are servants and serfs,
+faithful to their salt, who look to us for guidance and life.
+
+I use my words advisedly.  Tom Spink and Buckwheat are serfs and
+nothing else.  Henry, the training-ship boy, occupies an anomalous
+classification.  He is of our kind, but he can scarcely be called
+even a cadet of our kind.  He will some day win to us and become a
+mate or a captain, but in the meantime, of course, his past is
+against him.  He is a candidate, rising from the serf class to our
+class.  Also, he is only a youth, the iron of his heredity not yet
+tested and proven.
+
+Wada, Louis, and the steward are servants of Asiatic breed.  So are
+the two Japanese sail-makers--scarcely servants, not to be called
+slaves, but something in between.
+
+So, all told, there are eleven of us aft in the citadel.  But our
+followers are too servant-like and serf-like to be offensive
+fighters.  They will help us defend the high place against all
+attack; but they are incapable of joining with us in an attack on the
+other end of the ship.  They will fight like cornered rats to
+preserve their lives; but they will not advance like tigers upon the
+enemy.  Tom Spink is faithful but spirit-broken.  Buckwheat is
+hopelessly of the stupid lowly.  Henry has not yet won his spurs.  On
+our side remain Margaret, Mr. Pike, and myself.  The rest will hold
+the wall of the poop and fight thereon to the death, but they are not
+to be depended upon in a sortie.
+
+At the other end of the ship--and I may as well give the roster, are:
+the second mate, either to be called Mellaire or Waltham, a strong
+man of our own breed but a renegade; the three gangsters, killers and
+jackals, Bert Rhine, Nosey Murphy, and Kid Twist; the Maltese Cockney
+and Tony the crazy Greek; Frank Fitzgibbon and Richard Giller, the
+survivors of the trio of "bricklayers"; Anton Sorensen and Lars
+Jacobsen, stupid Scandinavian sailor-men; Ditman Olansen, the crank-
+eyed Berserk; John Hackey and Arthur Deacon, respectively hoodlum and
+white slaver; Shorty, the mixed-breed clown; Guido Bombini, the
+Italian hound; Andy Pay and Mulligan Jacobs, the bitter ones; the
+three topaz-eyed dreamers, who are unclassifiable; Isaac Chantz, the
+wounded Jew; Bob, the overgrown dolt; the feeble-minded Faun, lung-
+wounded; Nancy and Sundry Buyers, the two hopeless, helpless bosuns;
+and, finally, the sea-lawyer, Charles Davis.
+
+This makes twenty-seven of them against the eleven of us.  But there
+are men, strong in viciousness, among them.  They, too, have their
+serfs and bravos.  Guido Bombini and Isaac Chantz are certainly
+bravos.  And weaklings like Sorensen, and Jacobsen, and Bob, cannot
+be anything else than slaves to the men who compose the gangster
+clique.
+
+I failed to tell what happened yesterday, after Mr. Pike emptied his
+automatic and cleared the deck.  The poop was indubitably ours, and
+there was no possibility of the mutineers making a charge on us in
+broad daylight.  Margaret had gone below, accompanied by Wada, to see
+to the security of the port and starboard doors that open from the
+cabin directly on the main deck.  These are still caulked and tight
+and fastened on the inside, as they have been since the passage of
+Cape Horn began.
+
+Mr. Pike put one of the sail-makers at the wheel, and the steward,
+relieved and starting below, was attracted to the port quarter, where
+the patent log that towed astern was made fast.  Margaret had
+returned his knife to him, and he was carrying it in his hand when
+his attention was attracted astern to our wake.  Mike Cipriani and
+Bill Quigley had managed to catch the lazily moving log-line and were
+clinging to it.  The Elsinore was moving just fast enough to keep
+them on the surface instead of dragging them under.  Above them and
+about them circled curious and hungry albatrosses, Cape hens, and
+mollyhawks.  Even as I glimpsed the situation one of the big birds, a
+ten-footer at least, with a ten-inch beak to the fore, dropped down
+on the Italian.  Releasing his hold with one hand, he struck with his
+knife at the bird.  Feathers flew, and the albatross, deflected by
+the blow, fell clumsily into the water.
+
+Quite methodically, just as part of the day's work, the steward
+chopped down with his knife, catching the log-line between the steel
+edge and the rail.  At once, no longer buoyed up by the Elsinore's
+two-knot drag ahead, the wounded men began to swim and flounder.  The
+circling hosts of huge sea-birds descended upon them, with
+carnivorous beaks striking at their heads and shoulders and arms.  A
+great screeching and squawking arose from the winged things of prey
+as they strove for the living meat.  And yet, somehow, I was not very
+profoundly shocked.  These were the men whom I had seen eviscerate
+the shark and toss it overboard, and shout with joy as they watched
+it devoured alive by its brethren.  They had played a violent, cruel
+game with the things of life, and the things of life now played upon
+them the same violent, cruel game.  As they that rise by the sword
+perish by the sword, just so did these two men who had lived cruelly
+die cruelly.
+
+"Oh, well," was Mr. Pike's comment, "we've saved two sacks of mighty
+good coal."
+
+
+Certainly our situation might be worse.  We are cooking on the coal-
+stove and on the oil-burners.  We have servants to cook and serve for
+us.  And, most important of all, we are in possession of all the food
+on the Elsinore.
+
+Mr. Pike makes no mistake.  Realizing that with our crowd we cannot
+rush the crowd at the other end of the ship, he accepts the siege,
+which, as he says, consists of the besieged holding all food supplies
+while the besiegers are on the imminent edge of famine.
+
+"Starve the dogs," he growls.  "Starve 'm until they crawl aft and
+lick our shoes.  Maybe you think the custom of carrying the stores
+aft just happened.  Only it didn't.  Before you and I were born it
+was long-established and it was established on brass tacks.  They
+knew what they were about, the old cusses, when they put the grub in
+the lazarette."
+
+Louis says there is not more than three days' regular whack in the
+galley; that the barrel of hard-tack in the forecastle will quickly
+go; and that our chickens, which they stole last night from the top
+of the 'midship-house, are equivalent to no more than an additional
+day's supply.  In short, at the outside limit, we are convinced the
+men will be keen to talk surrender within the week.
+
+We are no longer sailing.  In last night's darkness we helplessly
+listened to the men loosing headsail-halyards and letting yards go
+down on the run.  Under orders of Mr. Pike I shot blindly and many
+times into the dark, but without result, save that we heard the
+bullets of answering shots strike against the chart-house.  So to-day
+we have not even a man at the wheel.  The Elsinore drifts idly on an
+idle sea, and we stand regular watches in the shelter of chart-house
+and jiggermast.  Mr. Pike says it is the laziest time he has had on
+the whole voyage.
+
+I alternate watches with him, although when on duty there is little
+to be done, save, in the daytime, to stand rifle in hand behind the
+jiggermast, and, in the night, to lurk along the break of the poop.
+Behind the chart-house, ready to repel assault, are my watch of four
+men:  Tom Spink, Wada, Buckwheat, and Louis.  Henry, the two Japanese
+sail-makers, and the old steward compose Mr. Pike's watch.
+
+It is his orders that no one for'ard is to be allowed to show
+himself, so, to-day, when the second mate appeared at the corner of
+the 'midship-house, I made him take a quick leap back with the thud
+of my bullet against the iron wall a foot from his head.  Charles
+David tried the same game and was similarly stimulated.
+
+Also, this evening, after dark, Mr. Pike put block-and-tackle on the
+first section of the bridge, heaved it out of place, and lowered it
+upon the poop.  Likewise he hoisted in the ladder at the break of the
+poop that leads down to the main deck.  The men will have to do some
+climbing if they ever elect to rush us.
+
+I am writing this in my watch below.  I came off duty at eight
+o'clock, and at midnight I go on deck to stay till four to-morrow
+morning.  Wada shakes his head and says that the Blackwood Company
+should rebate us on the first-class passage paid in advance.  We are
+working our passage, he contends.
+
+Margaret takes the adventure joyously.  It is the first time she has
+experienced mutiny, but she is such a thorough sea-woman that she
+appears like an old hand at the game.  She leaves the deck to the
+mate and me; but, still acknowledging his leadership, she has taken
+charge below and entirely manages the commissary, the cooking, and
+the sleeping arrangements.  We still keep our old quarters, and she
+has bedded the new-comers in the big after-room with blankets issued
+from the slop-chest.
+
+In a way, from the standpoint of her personal welfare, the mutiny is
+the best thing that could have happened to her.  It has taken her
+mind off her father and filled her waking hours with work to do.
+This afternoon, standing above the open booby-hatch, I heard her
+laugh ring out as in the old days coming down the Atlantic.  Yes, and
+she hums snatches of songs under her breath as she works.  In the
+second dog-watch this evening, after Mr. Pike had finished dinner and
+joined us on the poop, she told him that if he did not soon re-rig
+his phonograph she was going to start in on the piano.  The reason
+she advanced was the psychological effect such sounds of revelry
+would have on the starving mutineers.
+
+
+The days pass, and nothing of moment happens.  We get nowhere.  The
+Elsinore, without the steadying of her canvas, rolls emptily and
+drifts a lunatic course.  Sometimes she is bow on to the wind, and at
+other times she is directly before it; but at all times she is
+circling vaguely and hesitantly to get somewhere else than where she
+is.  As an illustration, at daylight this morning she came up into
+the wind as if endeavouring to go about.  In the course of half an
+hour she worked off till the wind was directly abeam.  In another
+half hour she was back into the wind.  Not until evening did she
+manage to get the wind on her port bow; but when she did, she
+immediately paid off, accomplished the complete circle in an hour,
+and recommenced her morning tactics of trying to get into the wind.
+
+And there is nothing for us to do save hold the poop against the
+attack that is never made.  Mr. Pike, more from force of habit than
+anything else, takes his regular observations and works up the
+Elsinore's position.  This noon she was eight miles east of
+yesterday's position, yet to-day's position, in longitude, was within
+a mile of where she was four days ago.  On the other hand she
+invariably makes nothing at the rate of seven or eight miles a day.
+
+Aloft, the Elsinore is a sad spectacle.  All is confusion and
+disorder.  The sails, unfurled, are a slovenly mess along the yards,
+and many loose ends sway dismally to every roll.  The only yard that
+is loose is the main-yard.  It is fortunate that wind and wave are
+mild, else would the iron-work carry away and the mutineers find the
+huge thing of steel about their ears.
+
+There is one thing we cannot understand.  A week has passed, and the
+men show no signs of being starved into submission.  Repeatedly and
+in vain has Mr. Pike interrogated the hands aft with us.  One and
+all, from the cook to Buckwheat, they swear they have no knowledge of
+any food for'ard, save the small supply in the galley and the barrel
+of hardtack in the forecastle.  Yet it is very evident that those
+for'ard are not starving.  We see the smoke from the galley-stove and
+can only conclude that they have food to cook.
+
+Twice has Bert Rhine attempted a truce, but both times his white
+flag, as soon as it showed above the edge of the 'midship-house, was
+fired upon by Mr. Pike.  The last occurrence was two days ago.  It is
+Mr. Pike's intention thoroughly to starve them into submission, but
+now he is beginning to worry about their mysterious food supply.
+
+Mr. Pike is not quite himself.  He is obsessed, I know beyond any
+doubt, with the idea of vengeance on the second mate.  On divers
+occasions, now, I have come unexpectedly upon him and found him
+muttering to himself with grim set face, or clenching and unclenching
+his big square fists and grinding his teeth.  His conversation
+continually runs upon the feasibility of our making a night attack
+for'ard, and he is perpetually questioning Tom Spink and Louis on
+their ideas of where the various men may be sleeping--the point of
+which always is:  WHERE IS THE SECOND MATE LIKELY TO BE SLEEPING?
+
+No later than yesterday afternoon did he give me most positive proof
+of his obsession.  It was four o'clock, the beginning of the first
+dog-watch, and he had just relieved me.  So careless have we grown,
+that we now stand in broad daylight at the exposed break of the poop.
+Nobody shoots at us, and, occasionally, over the top of the for'ard-
+house, Shorty sticks up his head and grins or makes clownish faces at
+us.  At such times Mr. Pike studies Shorty's features through the
+telescope in an effort to find signs of starvation.  Yet he admits
+dolefully that Shorty is looking fleshed-up.
+
+But to return.  Mr. Pike had just relieved me yesterday afternoon,
+when the second mate climbed the forecastle-head and sauntered to the
+very eyes of the Elsinore, where he stood gazing overside.
+
+"Take a crack at 'm," Mr. Pike said.
+
+It was a long shot, and I was taking slow and careful aim, when he
+touched my arm.
+
+"No; don't," he said.
+
+I lowered the little rifle and looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"You might hit him," he explained.  "And I want him for myself."
+
+
+Life is never what we expect it to be.  All our voyage from Baltimore
+south to the Horn and around the Horn has been marked by violence and
+death.  And now that it has culminated in open mutiny there is no
+more violence, much less death.  We keep to ourselves aft, and the
+mutineers keep to themselves for'ard.  There is no more harshness, no
+more snarling and bellowing of commands; and in this fine weather a
+general festival obtains.
+
+Aft, Mr. Pike and Margaret alternate with phonograph and piano; and
+for'ard, although we cannot see them, a full-fledged "foo-foo" band
+makes most of the day and night hideous.  A squealing accordion that
+Tom Spink says was the property of Mike Cipriani is played by Guido
+Bombini, who sets the pace and seems the leader of the foo-foo.
+There are two broken-reeded harmonicas.  Someone plays a jew's-harp.
+Then there are home-made fifes and whistles and drums, combs covered
+with paper, extemporized triangles, and bones made from ribs of salt
+horse such as negro minstrels use.
+
+The whole crew seems to compose the band, and, like a lot of monkey-
+folk rejoicing in rude rhythm, emphasizes the beat by hammering
+kerosene cans, frying-pans, and all sorts of things metallic or
+reverberant.  Some genius has rigged a line to the clapper of the
+ship's bell on the forecastle-head and clangs it horribly in the big
+foo-foo crises, though Bombini can be heard censuring him severely on
+occasion.  And to cap it all, the fog-horn machine pumps in at the
+oddest moments in imitation of a big bass viol.
+
+And this is mutiny on the high seas!  Almost every hour of my deck-
+watches I listen to this infernal din, and am maddened into desire to
+join with Mr. Pike in a night attack and put these rebellious and
+inharmonious slaves to work.
+
+Yet they are not entirely inharmonious.  Guido Bombini has a
+respectable though untrained tenor voice, and has surprised me by a
+variety of selections, not only from Verdi, but from Wagner and
+Massenet.  Bert Rhine and his crowd are full of rag-time junk, and
+one phrase that has caught the fancy of all hands, and which they
+roar out at all times, is:  "IT'S A BEAR!  IT'S A BEAR!  IT'S A
+BEAR!"  This morning Nancy, evidently very strongly urged, gave a
+doleful rendering of Flying Cloud.  Yes, and in the second dog-watch
+last evening our three topaz-eyed dreamers sang some folk-song
+strangely sweet and sad.
+
+And this is mutiny!  As I write I can scarcely believe it.  Yet I
+know Mr. Pike keeps the watch over my head.  I hear the shrill
+laughter of the steward and Louis over some ancient Chinese joke.
+Wada and the sail-makers, in the pantry, are, I know, talking
+Japanese politics.  And from across the cabin, along the narrow
+halls, I can hear Margaret softly humming as she goes to bed.
+
+But all doubts vanish at the stroke of eight bells, when I go on deck
+to relieve Mr. Pike, who lingers a moment for a "gain," as he calls
+it.
+
+"Say," he said confidentially, "you and I can clean out the whole
+gang.  All we got to do is sneak for'ard and turn loose.  As soon as
+we begin to shoot up, half of 'em'll bolt aft--lobsters like Nancy,
+an' Sundry Buyers, an' Jacobsen, an' Bob, an' Shorty, an' them three
+castaways, for instance.  An' while they're doin' that, an' our bunch
+on the poop is takin' 'em in, you an' me can make a pretty big hole
+in them that's left.  What d'ye say?"
+
+I hesitated, thinking of Margaret.
+
+"Why, say," he urged, "once I jumped into that fo'c's'le, at close
+range, I'd start right in, blim-blam-blim, fast as you could wink,
+nailing them gangsters, an' Bombini, an' the Sheeny, an' Deacon, an'
+the Cockney, an' Mulligan Jacobs, an' . . . an' . . . Waltham."
+
+"That would be mine," I smiled.  "You've only eight shots in your
+Colt."
+
+Mr. Pike considered a moment, and revised his list.  "All right," he
+agreed, "I guess I'll have to let Jacobs go.  What d'ye say?  Are you
+game?"
+
+Still I hesitated, but before I could speak he anticipated me and
+returned to his fidelity.
+
+"No, you can't do it, Mr. Pathurst.  If by any luck they got the both
+of us . . . No; we'll just stay aft and sit tight until they're
+starved to it . . . But where they get their tucker gets me.  For'ard
+she's as bare as a bone, as any decent ship ought to be, and yet look
+at 'em, rolling hog fat.  And by rights they ought to a-quit eatin' a
+week ago."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+
+Yes, it is certainly mutiny.  Collecting water from the leaders of
+the chart-house in a shower of rain this morning, Buckwheat exposed
+himself, and a long, lucky revolver-shot from for'ard caught him in
+the shoulder.  The bullet was small-calibre and spent ere it reached
+him, so that he received no more than a flesh-wound, though he
+carried on as if he were dying until Mr. Pike hushed his noise by
+cuffing his ears.
+
+I should not like to have Mr. Pike for my surgeon.  He probed for the
+bullet with his little finger, which was far too big for the
+aperture; and with his little finger, while with his other hand he
+threatened another ear-clout, he gouged out the leaden pellet.  Then
+he sent the boy below, where Margaret took him in charge with
+antiseptics and dressings.
+
+I see her so rarely that a half-hour alone with her these days is an
+adventure.  She is busy morning to night in keeping her house in
+order.  As I write this, through my open door I can hear her laying
+the law down to the men in the after-room.  She has issued
+underclothes all around from the slop-chest, and is ordering them to
+take a bath in the rain-water just caught.  And to make sure of their
+thoroughness in the matter, she has told off Louis and the steward to
+supervise the operation.  Also, she has forbidden them smoking their
+pipes in the after-room.  And, to cap everything, they are to scrub
+walls, ceiling, everything, and then start to-morrow morning at
+painting.  All of which serves to convince me almost that mutiny does
+not obtain and that I have imagined it.
+
+But no.  I hear Buckwheat blubbering and demanding how he can take a
+bath in his wounded condition.  I wait and listen for Margaret's
+judgment.  Nor am I disappointed.  Tom Spink and Henry are told off
+to the task, and the thorough scrubbing of Buckwheat is assured.
+
+
+The mutineers are not starving.  To-day they have been fishing for
+albatrosses.  A few minutes after they caught the first one its
+carcase was flung overboard.  Mr. Pike studied it through his sea-
+glasses, and I heard him grit his teeth when he made certain that it
+was not the mere feathers and skin but the entire carcass.  They had
+taken only its wing-bones to make into pipe-stems.  The inference was
+obvious:  STARVING MEN WOULD NOT THROW MEAT AWAY IN SUCH FASHION.
+
+But where do they get their food?  It is a sea-mystery in itself,
+although I might not so deem it were it not for Mr. Pike.
+
+"I think, and think, till my brain is all frazzled out," he tells me;
+"and yet I can't get a line on it.  I know every inch of space on the
+Elsinore, and know there isn't an ounce of grub anywhere for'ard, and
+yet they eat!  I've overhauled the lazarette.  As near as I can make
+it out, nothing is missing.  Then where do they get it?  That's what
+I want to know.  Where do they get it?"
+
+I know that this morning he spent hours in the lazarette with the
+steward and the cook, overhauling and checking off from the lists of
+the Baltimore agents.  And I know that they came up out of the
+lazarette, the three of them, dripping with perspiration and baffled.
+The steward has raised the hypothesis that, first of all, there were
+extra stores left over from the previous voyage, or from previous
+voyages, and, next, that the stealing of these stores must have taken
+place during the night-watches when it was Mr. Pike's turn below.
+
+At any rate, the mate takes the food mystery almost as much to heart
+as he takes the persistent and propinquitous existence of Sidney
+Waltham.
+
+I am coming to realize the meaning of watch-and-watch.  To begin
+with, I spend on deck twelve hours, and a fraction more, of each
+twenty-four.  A fair portion of the remaining twelve is spent in
+eating, in dressing, and in undressing, and with Margaret.  As a
+result, I feel the need for more sleep than I am getting.  I scarcely
+read at all, now.  The moment my head touches the pillow I am asleep.
+Oh, I sleep like a baby, eat like a navvy, and in years have not
+enjoyed such physical well-being.  I tried to read George Moore last
+night, and was dreadfully bored.  He may be a realist, but I solemnly
+aver he does not know reality on that tight, little, sheltered-life
+archipelago of his.  If he could wind-jam around the Horn just one
+voyage he would be twice the writer.
+
+And Mr. Pike, for practically all of his sixty-nine years, has stood
+his watch-and-watch, with many a spill-over of watches into watches.
+And yet he is iron.  In a struggle with him I am confident that he
+would break me like so much straw.  He is truly a prodigy of a man,
+and, so far as to-day is concerned, an anachronism.
+
+The Faun is not dead, despite my unlucky bullet.  Henry insisted that
+he caught a glimpse of him yesterday.  To-day I saw him myself.  He
+came to the corner of the 'midship-house and gazed wistfully aft at
+the poop, straining and eager to understand.  In the same way I have
+often seen Possum gaze at me.
+
+It has just struck me that of our eight followers five are Asiatic
+and only three are our own breed.  Somehow it reminds me of India and
+of Clive and Hastings.
+
+And the fine weather continues, and we wonder how long a time must
+elapse ere our mutineers eat up their mysterious food and are starved
+back to work.
+
+We are almost due west of Valparaiso and quite a bit less than a
+thousand miles off the west coast of South America.  The light
+northerly breezes, varying from north-east to west, would, according
+to Mr. Pike, work us in nicely for Valparaiso if only we had sail on
+the Elsinore.  As it is, sailless, she drifts around and about and
+makes nowhere save for the slight northerly drift each day.
+
+
+Mr. Pike is beside himself.  In the past two days he has displayed
+increasing possession of himself by the one idea of vengeance on the
+second mate.  It is not the mutiny, irksome as it is and helpless as
+it makes him; it is the presence of the murderer of his old-time and
+admired skipper, Captain Somers.
+
+The mate grins at the mutiny, calls it a snap, speaks gleefully of
+how his wages are running up, and regrets that he is not ashore,
+where he would be able to take a hand in gambling on the reinsurance.
+But the sight of Sidney Waltham, calmly gazing at sea and sky from
+the forecastle-head, or astride the far end of the bowsprit and
+fishing for sharks, saddens him.  Yesterday, coming to relieve me, he
+borrowed my rifle and turned loose the stream of tiny pellets on the
+second mate, who coolly made his line secure ere he scrambled in-
+board.  Of course, it was only one chance in a hundred that Mr. Pike
+might have hit him, but Sidney Waltham did not care to encourage the
+chance.
+
+And yet it is not like mutiny--not like the conventional mutiny I
+absorbed as a boy, and which has become classic in the literature of
+the sea.  There is no hand-to-hand fighting, no crash of cannon and
+flash of cutlass, no sailors drinking grog, no lighted matches held
+over open powder-magazines.  Heavens!--there isn't a single cutlass
+nor a powder-magazine on board.  And as for grog, not a man has had a
+drink since Baltimore.
+
+
+Well, it is mutiny after all.  I shall never doubt it again.  It may
+be nineteen-thirteen mutiny on a coal-carrier, with feeblings and
+imbeciles and criminals for mutineers; but at any rate mutiny it is,
+and at least in the number of deaths it is reminiscent of the old
+days.  For things have happened since last I had opportunity to write
+up this log.  For that matter, I am now the keeper of the Elsinore's
+official log as well, in which work Margaret helps me.
+
+And I might have known it would happen.  At four yesterday morning I
+relieved Mr. Pike.  When in the darkness I came up to him at the
+break of the poop, I had to speak to him twice to make him aware of
+my presence.  And then he merely grunted acknowledgment in an absent
+sort of way.
+
+The next moment he brightened up, and was himself save that he was
+too bright.  He was making an effort.  I felt this, but was quite
+unprepared for what followed.
+
+"I'll be back in a minute," he said, as he put his leg over the rail
+and lightly and swiftly lowered himself down into the darkness.
+
+There was nothing I could do.  To cry out or to attempt to reason
+with him would only have drawn the mutineers' attention.  I heard his
+feet strike the deck beneath as he let go.  Immediately he started
+for'ard.  Little enough precaution he took.  I swear that clear to
+the 'midship-house I heard the dragging age-lag of his feet.  Then
+that ceased, and that was all.
+
+I repeat.  That was all.  Never a sound came from for'ard.  I held my
+watch till daylight.  I held it till Margaret came on deck with her
+cheery "What ho of the night, brave mariner?"  I held the next watch
+(which should have been the mate's) till midday, eating both
+breakfast and lunch behind the sheltering jiggermast.  And I held all
+afternoon, and through both dog-watches, my dinner served likewise on
+the deck.
+
+And that was all.  Nothing happened.  The galley-stove smoked three
+times, advertising the cooking of three meals.  Shorty made faces at
+me as usual across the rim of the for'ard-house.  The Maltese Cockney
+caught an albatross.  There was some excitement when Tony the Greek
+hooked a shark off the jib-boom, so big that half a dozen tailed on
+to the line and failed to land it.  But I caught no glimpse of Mr.
+Pike nor of the renegade Sidney Waltham.
+
+In short, it was a lazy, quiet day of sunshine and gentle breeze.
+There was no inkling to what had happened to the mate.  Was he a
+prisoner?  Was he already overside?  Why were there no shots?  He had
+his big automatic.  It is inconceivable that he did not use it at
+least once.  Margaret and I discussed the affair till we were well a-
+weary, but reached no conclusion.
+
+She is a true daughter of the race.  At the end of the second dog-
+watch, armed with her father's revolver, she insisted on standing the
+first watch of the night.  I compromised with the inevitable by
+having Wada make up my bed on the deck in the shelter of the cabin
+skylight just for'ard of the jiggermast.  Henry, the two sail-makers
+and the steward, variously equipped with knives and clubs, were
+stationed along the break of the poop.
+
+And right here I wish to pass my first criticism on modern mutiny.
+On ships like the Elsinore there are not enough weapons to go around.
+The only firearms now aft are Captain West's .38 Colt revolver, and
+my .22 automatic Winchester.  The old steward, with a penchant for
+hacking and chopping, has his long knife and a butcher's cleaver.
+Henry, in addition to his sheath-knife, has a short bar of iron.
+Louis, despite a most sanguinary array of butcher-knives and a big
+poker, pins his cook's faith on hot water and sees to it that two
+kettles are always piping on top the cabin stove.  Buckwheat, who on
+account of his wound is getting all night in for a couple of nights,
+cherishes a hatchet.
+
+The rest of our retainers have knives and clubs, although Yatsuda,
+the first sail-maker, carries a hand-axe, and Uchino, the second
+sail-maker, sleeping or waking, never parts from a claw-hammer.  Tom
+Spink has a harpoon.  Wada, however, is the genius.  By means of the
+cabin stove he has made a sharp pike-point of iron and fitted it to a
+pole.  To-morrow be intends to make more for the other men.
+
+It is rather shuddery, however, to speculate on the terrible
+assortment of cutting, gouging, jabbing and slashing weapons with
+which the mutineers are able to equip themselves from the carpenter's
+shop.  If it ever comes to an assault on the poop there will be a
+weird mess of wounds for the survivors to dress.  For that matter,
+master as I am of my little rifle, no man could gain the poop in the
+day-time.  Of course, if rush they will, they will rush us in the
+night, when my rifle will be worthless.  Then it will be blow for
+blow, hand-to-hand, and the strongest pates and arms will win.
+
+But no.  I have just bethought me.  We shall be ready for any night-
+rush.  I'll take a leaf out of modern warfare, and show them not only
+that we are top-dog (a favourite phrase of the mate), but WHY we are
+top-dog.  It is simple--night illumination.  As I write I work opt
+the idea--gasoline, balls of oakum, caps and gunpowder from a few
+cartridges, Roman candles, and flares blue, red, and green, shallow
+metal receptacles to carry the explosive and inflammable stuff; and a
+trigger-like arrangement by which, pulling on a string, the caps are
+exploded in the gunpowder and fire set to the gasoline-soaked oakum
+and to the flares and candles.  It will be brain as well as brawn
+against mere brawn.
+
+
+I have worked like a Trojan all day, and the idea is realized.
+Margaret helped me out with suggestions, and Tom Spink did the
+sailorizing.  Over our head, from the jiggermast, the steel stays
+that carry the three jigger-trysails descend high above the break of
+the poop and across the main deck to the mizzenmast.  A light line
+has been thrown over each stay, and been thrown repeatedly around so
+as to form an unslipping knot.  Tom Spink waited till dark, when he
+went aloft and attached loose rings of stiff wire around the stays
+below the knots.  Also he bent on hoisting-gear and connected
+permanent fastenings with the sliding rings.  And further, between
+rings and fastenings, is a slack of fifty feet of light line.
+
+This is the idea:  after dark each night we shall hoist our three
+metal wash-basins, loaded with inflammables, up to the stays.  The
+arrangement is such that at the first alarm of a rush, by pulling a
+cord the trigger is pulled that ignites the powder, and the very same
+pull operates a trip-device that lets the rings slide down the steel
+stays.  Of course, suspended from the rings, are the illuminators,
+and when they have run down the stays fifty feet the lines will
+automatically bring them to rest.  Then all the main deck between the
+poop and the mizzen-mast will be flooded with light, while we shall
+be in comparative darkness.
+
+Of course each morning before daylight we shall lower all this
+apparatus to the deck, so that the men for'ard will not guess what we
+have up our sleeve, or, rather, what we have up on the trysail-stays.
+Even to-day the little of our gear that has to be left standing
+aroused their curiosity.  Head after head showed over the edge of the
+for'ard-house as they peeped and peered and tried to make out what we
+were up to.  Why, I find myself almost looking forward to an attack
+in order to see the device work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+
+
+And what has happened to Mr. Pike remains a mystery.  For that
+matter, what has happened to the second mate?  In the past three days
+we have by our eyes taken the census of the mutineers.  Every man has
+been seen by us with the sole exception of Mr. Mellaire, or Sidney
+Waltham, as I assume I must correctly name him.  He has not appeared-
+-does not appear; and we can only speculate and conjecture.
+
+In the past three days various interesting things have taken place.
+Margaret stands watch and watch with me, day and night, the clock
+around; for there is no one of our retainers to whom we can entrust
+the responsibility of a watch.  Though mutiny obtains and we are
+besieged in the high place, the weather is so mild and there is so
+little call on our men that they have grown careless and sleep aft of
+the chart-house when it is their watch on deck.  Nothing ever
+happens, and, like true sailors, they wax fat and lazy.  Even have I
+found Louis, the steward, and Wada guilty of cat-napping.  In fact,
+the training-ship boy, Henry, is the only one who has never lapsed.
+
+Oh, yes, and I gave Tom Spink a thrashing yesterday.  Since the
+disappearance of the mate he had had little faith in me, and had been
+showing vague signs of insolence and insubordination.  Both Margaret
+and I had noted it independently.  Day before yesterday we talked it
+over.
+
+"He is a good sailor, but weak," she said.  "If we let him go on, he
+will infect the rest."
+
+"Very well, I'll take him in hand," I announced valorously.
+
+"You will have to," she encouraged.  "Be hard.  Be hard.  You must be
+hard."
+
+Those who sit in the high places must be hard, yet have I discovered
+that it is hard to be hard.  For instance, easy enough was it to drop
+Steve Roberts as he was in the act of shooting at me.  Yet it is most
+difficult to be hard with a chuckle-headed retainer like Tom Spink--
+especially when he continually fails by a shade to give sufficient
+provocation.  For twenty-four hours after my talk with Margaret I was
+on pins and needles to have it out with him, yet rather than have had
+it out with him I should have preferred to see the poop rushed by the
+gang from the other side.
+
+Not in a day can the tyro learn to employ the snarling immediacy of
+mastery of Mr. Pike, nor the reposeful, voiceless mastery of a
+Captain West.  Truly, the situation was embarrassing.  I was not
+trained in the handling of men, and Tom Spink knew it in his chuckle-
+headed way.  Also, in his chuckle-headed way, he was dispirited by
+the loss of the mate.  Fearing the mate, nevertheless he had depended
+on the mate to fetch him through with a whole skin, or at least
+alive.  On me he has no dependence.  What chance had the gentleman
+passenger and the captain's daughter against the gang for'ard?  So he
+must have reasoned, and, so reasoning, become despairing and
+desperate.
+
+After Margaret had told me to be hard I watched Tom Spink with an
+eagle eye, and he must have sensed my attitude, for he carefully
+forebore from overstepping, while all the time he palpitated just on
+the edge of overstepping.  Yes, and it was clear that Buckwheat was
+watching to learn the outcome of this veiled refractoriness.  For
+that matter, the situation was not being missed by our keen-eyed
+Asiatics, and I know that I caught Louis several times verging on the
+offence of offering me advice.  But he knew his place and managed to
+keep his tongue between his teeth.
+
+At last, yesterday, while I held the watch, Tom Spink was guilty of
+spitting tobacco juice on the deck.
+
+Now it must be understood that such an act is as grave an offence of
+the sea as blasphemy is of the Church.
+
+It was Margaret who came to where I was stationed by the jiggermast
+and told me what had occurred; and it was she who took my rifle and
+relieved me so that I could go aft.
+
+There was the offensive spot, and there was Tom Spink, his cheek
+bulging with a quid.
+
+"Here, you, get a swab and mop that up," I commanded in my harshest
+manner.
+
+Tom Spink merely rolled his quid with his tongue and regarded me with
+sneering thoughtfulness.  I am sure he was no more surprised than was
+I by the immediateness of what followed.  My fist went out like an
+arrow from a released bow, and Tom Spink staggered back, tripped
+against the corner of the tarpaulin-covered sounding-machine, and
+sprawled on the deck.  He tried to make a fight of it, but I followed
+him up, giving him no chance to set himself or recover from the
+surprise of my first onslaught.
+
+Now it so happens that not since I was a boy have I struck a person
+with my naked fist, and I candidly admit that I enjoyed the trouncing
+I administered to poor Tom Spink.  Yes, and in the rapid play about
+the deck I caught a glimpse of Margaret.  She had stepped out of the
+shelter of the mast and was looking on from the corner of the chart-
+house.  Yes, and more; she was looking on with a cool, measuring eye.
+
+Oh, it was all very grotesque, to be sure.  But then, mutiny on the
+high seas in the year nineteen-thirteen is also grotesque.  No lists
+here between mailed knights for a lady's favour, but merely the
+trouncing of a chuckle-head for spitting on the deck of a coal-
+carrier.  Nevertheless, the fact that my lady looked on added zest to
+my enterprise, and, doubtlessly, speed and weight to my blows, and at
+least half a dozen additional clouts to the unlucky sailor.
+
+Yes, man is strangely and wonderfully made.  Now that I coolly
+consider the matter, I realize that it was essentially the same
+spirit with which I enjoyed beating up Tom Spink, that I have in the
+past enjoyed contests of the mind in which I have out-epigrammed
+clever opponents.  In the one case, one proves himself top-dog of the
+mind; in the other, top-dog of the muscle.  Whistler and Wilde were
+just as much intellectual bullies as I was a physical bully yesterday
+morning when I punched Tom Spink into lying down and staying down.
+
+And my knuckles are sore and swollen.  I cease writing for a moment
+to look at them and to hope that they will not stay permanently
+enlarged.
+
+At any rate, Tom Spink took his disciplining and promised to come in
+and be good.
+
+"Sir!" I thundered at him, quite in Mr. Pike's most bloodthirsty
+manner.
+
+"Sir," he mumbled with bleeding lips.  "Yes, sir, I'll mop it up,
+sir.  Yes, sir."
+
+I could scarcely keep from laughing in his face, the whole thing was
+so ludicrous; but I managed to look my haughtiest, and sternest, and
+fiercest, while I superintended the deck-cleansing.  The funniest
+thing about the affair was that I must have knocked Tom Spink's quid
+down his throat, for he was gagging and hiccoughing all the time he
+mopped and scrubbed.
+
+The atmosphere aft has been wonderfully clear ever since.  Tom Spink
+obeys all orders on the jump, and Buckwheat jumps with equal
+celerity.  As for the five Asiatics, I feel that they are stouter
+behind me now that I have shown masterfulness.  By punching a man's
+face I verily believe I have doubled our united strength.  And there
+is no need to punch any of the rest.  The Asiatics are keen and
+willing.  Henry is a true cadet of the breed, Buckwheat will follow
+Tom Spink's lead, and Tom Spink, a proper Anglo-Saxon peasant, will
+lead Buckwheat all the better by virtue of the punching.
+
+
+Two days have passed, and two noteworthy things have happened.  The
+men seem to be nearing the end of their mysterious food supply, and
+we have had our first truce.
+
+I have noted, through the glasses, that no more carcasses of the
+mollyhawks they are now catching are thrown overboard.  This means
+that they have begun to eat the tough and unsavoury creatures,
+although it does not mean, of course, that they have entirely
+exhausted their other stores.
+
+It was Margaret, her sailor's eye on the falling barometer and on the
+"making" stuff adrift in the sky, who called my attention to a coming
+blow.
+
+"As soon as the sea rises," she said, "we'll have that loose main-
+yard and all the rest of the top-hamper tumbling down on deck."
+
+So it was that I raised the white flag for a parley.  Bert Rhine and
+Charles Davis came abaft the 'midship-house, and, while we talked,
+many faces peered over the for'ard edge of the house and many forms
+slouched into view on the deck on each side of the house.
+
+"Well, getting tired?" was Bert Rhine's insolent greeting.  "Anything
+we can do for you?"
+
+"Yes, there is," I answered sharply.  "You can save your heads so
+that when you return to work there will be enough of you left to do
+the work."
+
+"If you are making threats--" Charles Davis began, but was silenced
+by a glare from the gangster.
+
+"Well, what is it?" Bert Rhine demanded.  "Cough it off your chest."
+
+"It's for your own good," was my reply.  "It is coming on to blow,
+and all that unfurled canvas aloft will bring the yards down on your
+heads.  We're safe here, aft.  You are the ones who will run risks,
+and it is up to you to hustle your crowd aloft and make things fast
+and ship-shape."
+
+"And if we don't?" the gangster sneered.
+
+"Why, you'll take your chances, that is all," I answered carelessly.
+"I just want to call your attention to the fact that one of those
+steel yards, end-on, will go through the roof of your forecastle as
+if it were so much eggshell."
+
+Bert Rhine looked to Charles Davis for verification, and the latter
+nodded.
+
+"We'll talk it over first," the gangster announced.
+
+"And I'll give you ten minutes," I returned.  "If at the end of ten
+minutes you've not started taking in, it will be too late.  I shall
+put a bullet into any man who shows himself."
+
+"All right, we'll talk it over."
+
+As they started to go back, I called:
+
+"One moment."
+
+They stopped and turned about.
+
+"What have you done to Mr. Pike?" I asked.
+
+Even the impassive Bert Rhine could not quite conceal his surprise.
+
+"An' what have you done with Mr. Mellaire!" he retorted.  "You tell
+us, an' we'll tell you."
+
+I am confident of the genuineness of his surprise.  Evidently the
+mutineers have been believing us guilty of the disappearance of the
+second mate, just as we have been believing them guilty of the
+disappearance of the first mate.  The more I dwell upon it the more
+it seems the proposition of the Kilkenny cats, a case of mutual
+destruction on the part of the two mates.
+
+"Another thing," I said quickly.  "Where do you get your food?"
+
+Bert Rhine laughed one of his silent laughs; Charles Davis assumed an
+expression of mysteriousness and superiority; and Shorty, leaping
+into view from the corner of the house, danced a jig of triumph.
+
+I drew out my watch.
+
+"Remember," I said, "you've ten minutes in which to make a start."
+
+They turned and went for'ard, and, before the ten minutes were up,
+all hands were aloft and stowing canvas.  All this time the wind, out
+of the north-west, was breezing up.  The old familiar harp-chords of
+a rising gale were strumming along the rigging, and the men, I verily
+believe from lack of practice, were particularly slow at their work.
+
+"It would be better if the upper-and-lower top-sails are set so that
+we can heave to," Margaret suggested.  "They will steady her and make
+it more comfortable for us."
+
+I seized the idea and improved upon it.
+
+"Better set the upper and lower topsails so that we can handle the
+ship," I called to the gangster, who was ordering the men about,
+quite like a mate, from the top of the 'midship-house.
+
+He considered the idea, and then gave the proper orders, although it
+was the Maltese Cockney, with Nancy and Sundry Buyers under him, who
+carried the orders out.
+
+I ordered Tom Spink to the long-idle wheel, and gave him the course,
+which was due east by the steering compass.  This put the wind on our
+port quarter, so that the Elsinore began to move through the water
+before a fair breeze.  And due east, less than a thousand miles away,
+lay the coast of South America and the port of Valparaiso.
+
+Strange to say, none of our mutineers objected to this, and after
+dark, as we tore along before a full-sized gale, I sent my own men up
+on top the chart-house to take the gaskets off the spanker.  This was
+the only sail we could set and trim and in every way control.  It is
+true the mizzen-braces were still rigged aft to the poop, according
+to Horn practice.  But, while we could thus trim the mizzen-yards,
+the sails themselves, in setting or furling, were in the hands of the
+for'ard crowd.
+
+Margaret, beside me in the darkness at the break of the poop, put her
+hand in mine with a warm pressure, as both our tiny watches swayed up
+the spanker and as both of us held our breaths in an effort to feel
+the added draw in the Elsinore's speed.
+
+"I never wanted to marry a sailor," she said.  "And I thought I was
+safe in the hands of a landsman like you.  And yet here you are, with
+all the stuff of the sea in you, running down your easting for port.
+Next thing, I suppose, I'll see you out with a sextant, shooting the
+sun or making star-observations."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+
+
+Four more days have passed; the gale has blown itself out; we are not
+more than three hundred and fifty miles off Valparaiso; and the
+Elsinore, this time due to me and my own stubbornness, is rolling in
+the wind and heading nowhere in a light breeze at the rate of nothing
+but driftage per hour.
+
+In the height of the gusts, in the three days and nights of the gale,
+we logged as much as eight, and even nine, knots.  What bothered me
+was the acquiescence of the mutineers in my programme.  They were
+sensible enough in the simple matter of geography to know what I was
+doing.  They had control of the sails, and yet they permitted me to
+run for the South American coast.
+
+More than that, as the gale eased on the morning of the third day,
+they actually went aloft, set top-gallant-sails, royals, and
+skysails, and trimmed the yards to the quartering breeze.  This was
+too much for the Saxon streak in me, whereupon I wore the Elsinore
+about before the wind, fetched her up upon it, and lashed the wheel.
+Margaret and I are agreed in the hypothesis that their plan is to get
+inshore until land is sighted, at which time they will desert in the
+boats.
+
+"But we don't want them to desert," she proclaims with flashing eyes.
+"We are bound for Seattle.  They must return to duty.  They've got
+to, soon, for they are beginning to starve."
+
+"There isn't a navigator aft," I oppose.
+
+Promptly she withers me with her scorn.
+
+"You, a master of books, by all the sea-blood in your body should be
+able to pick up the theoretics of navigation while I snap my fingers.
+Furthermore, remember that I can supply the seamanship.  Why, any
+squarehead peasant, in a six months' cramming course at any seaport
+navigation school, can pass the examiners for his navigator's papers.
+That means six hours for you.  And less.  If you can't, after an
+hour's reading and an hour's practice with the sextant, take a
+latitude observation and work it out, I'll do it for you."
+
+"You mean you know?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I mean, from the little I know, that I know I can learn to know a
+meridian sight and the working out of it.  I mean that I can learn to
+know inside of two hours."
+
+Strange to say, the gale, after easing to a mild breeze, recrudesced
+in a sort of after-clap.  With sails untrimmed and flapping, the
+consequent smashing, crashing, and rending of our gear can be
+imagined.  It brought out in alarm every man for'ard.
+
+"Trim the yards!" I yelled at Bert Rhine, who, backed for counsel by
+Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney, actually came directly beneath
+me on the main deck in order to hear above the commotion aloft.
+
+"Keep a-runnin, an' you won't have to trim," the gangster shouted up
+to me.
+
+"Want to make land, eh?" I girded down at him.  "Getting hungry, eh?
+Well, you won't make land or anything else in a thousand years once
+you get all your top-hamper piled down on deck."
+
+I have forgotten to state that this occurred at midday yesterday.
+
+"What are you goin' to do if we trim?" Charles Davis broke in.
+
+"Run off shore," I replied, "and get your gang out in deep sea where
+it will be starved back to duty."
+
+"We'll furl, an' let you heave to," the gangster proposed.
+
+I shook my head and held up my rifle.  "You'll have to go aloft to do
+it, and the first man that gets into the shrouds will get this."
+
+"Then she can go to hell for all we care," he said, with emphatic
+conclusiveness.
+
+And just then the fore-topgallant-yard carried away--luckily as the
+bow was down-pitched into a trough of sea-and when the slow,
+confused, and tangled descent was accomplished the big stick lay
+across the wreck of both bulwarks and of that portion of the bridge
+between the foremast and the forecastle head.
+
+Bert Rhine heard, but could not see, the damage wrought.  He looked
+up at me challengingly, and sneered:
+
+"Want some more to come down?"
+
+It could not have happened more apropos.  The port-brace, and
+immediately afterwards the starboard-brace, of the crojack-yard-
+carried away.  This was the big, lowest spar on the mizzen, and as
+the huge thing of steel swung wildly back and forth the gangster and
+his followers turned and crouched as they looked up to see.  Next,
+the gooseneck of the truss, on which it pivoted, smashed away.
+Immediately the lifts and lower-topsail sheets parted, and with a
+fore-and-aft pitch of the ship the spar up-ended and crashed to the
+deck upon Number Three hatch, destroying that section of the bridge
+in its fall.
+
+All this was new to the gangster--as it was to me--but Charles Davis
+and the Maltese Cockney thoroughly apprehended the situation.
+
+"Stand out from under!" I yelled sardonically; and the three of them
+cowered and shrank away as their eyes sought aloft for what new spar
+was thundering down upon them.
+
+The lower-topsail, its sheets parted by the fall of the crojack-yard,
+was tearing out of the bolt-ropes and ribboning away to leeward and
+making such an uproar that they might well expect its yard to carry
+away.  Since this wreckage of our beautiful gear was all new to me, I
+was quite prepared to see the thing happen.
+
+The gangster-leader, no sailor, but, after months at sea, intelligent
+enough and nervously strong enough to appreciate the danger, turned
+his head and looked up at me.  And I will do him the credit to say
+that he took his time while all our world of gear aloft seemed
+smashing to destruction.
+
+"I guess we'll trim yards," he capitulated.
+
+"Better get the skysails and royals off," Margaret said in my ear.
+
+"While you're about it, get in the skysails and royals!" I shouted
+down.  "And make a decent job of the gasketing!"
+
+Both Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney advertised their relief in
+their faces as they heard my words, and, at a nod from the gangster,
+they started for'ard on the run to put the orders into effect.
+
+Never, in the whole voyage, did our crew spring to it in more lively
+fashion.  And lively fashion was needed to save our gear.  As it was,
+they cut away the remnants of the mizzen-lower-topsail with their
+sheath-knives, and they loosed the main-skysail out of its bolt-
+ropes.
+
+The first infraction of our agreement was on the main-lower-topsail.
+This they attempted to furl.  The carrying away of the crojack and
+the blowing away of the mizzen-lower-topsail gave me freedom to see
+and aim, and when the tiny messengers from my rifle began to spat
+through the canvas and to spat against the steel of the yard, the men
+strung along it desisted from passing the gaskets.  I waved my will
+to Bert Rhine, who acknowledged me and ordered the sail set again and
+the yard trimmed.
+
+"What is the use of running off-shore?" I said to Margaret, when the
+kites were snugged down and all yards trimmed on the wind.  "Three
+hundred and fifty miles off the land is as good as thirty-five
+hundred so far as starvation is concerned."
+
+So, instead of making speed through the water toward deep sea, I hove
+the Elsinore to on the starboard tack with no more than leeway
+driftage to the west and south.
+
+But our gallant mutineers had their will of us that very night.  In
+the darkness we could hear the work aloft going on as yards were run
+down, sheets let go, and sails dewed up and gasketed.  I did try a
+few random shots, and all my reward was to hear the whine and creak
+of ropes through sheaves and to receive an equally random fire of
+revolver-shots.
+
+It is a most curious situation.  We of the high place are masters of
+the steering of the Elsinore, while those for'ard are masters of the
+motor power.  The only sail that is wholly ours is the spanker.  They
+control absolutely--sheets, halyards, clewlines, buntlines, braces,
+and down-hauls--every sail on the fore and main.  We control the
+braces on the mizzen, although they control the canvas on the mizzen.
+For that matter, Margaret and I fail to comprehend why they do not go
+aloft any dark night and sever the mizzen-braces at the yard-ends.
+All that prevents this, we are decided, is laziness.  For if they did
+sever the braces that lead aft into our hands, they would be
+compelled to rig new braces for'ard in some fashion, else, in the
+rolling, would the mizzenmast be stripped of every spar.
+
+And still the mutiny we are enduring is ridiculous and grotesque.
+There was never a mutiny like it.  It violates all standards and
+precedents.  In the old classic mutinies, long ere this, attacking
+like tigers, the seamen should have swarmed over the poop and killed
+most of us or been most of them killed.
+
+Wherefore I sneer at our gallant mutineers, and recommend trained
+nurses for them, quite in the manner of Mr. Pike.  But Margaret
+shakes her head and insists that human nature is human nature, and
+that under similar circumstances human nature will express itself
+similarly.  In short, she points to the number of deaths that have
+already occurred, and declares that on some dark night, sooner or
+later, whenever the pinch of hunger sufficiently sharpens, we shall
+see our rascals storming aft.
+
+And in the meantime, except for the tenseness of it, and for the
+incessant watchfulness which Margaret and I alone maintain, it is
+more like a mild adventure, more like a page out of some book of
+romance which ends happily.
+
+It is surely romance, watch and watch for a man and a woman who love,
+to relieve each other's watches.  Each such relief is a love passage
+and unforgettable.  Never was there wooing like it--the muttered
+surmises of wind and weather, the whispered councils, the kissed
+commands in palms of hands, the dared contacts of the dark.
+
+Oh, truly, I have often, since this voyage began, told the books to
+go hang.  And yet the books are at the back of the race-life of me.
+I am what I am out of ten thousand generations of my kind.  Of that
+there is no discussion.  And yet my midnight philosophy stands the
+test of my breed.  I must have selected my books out of the ten
+thousand generations that compose me.  I have killed a man--Steve
+Roberts.  As a perishing blond without an alphabet I should have done
+this unwaveringly.  As a perishing blond with an alphabet, plus the
+contents in my brain of the philosophizing of all philosophers, I
+have killed this same man with the same unwaveringness.  Culture has
+not emasculated me.  I am quite unaffected.  It was in the day's
+work, and my kind have always been day-workers, doing the day's work,
+whatever it might be, in high adventure or dull ploddingness, and
+always doing it.
+
+Never would I ask to set back the dial of time or event.  I would
+kill Steve Roberts again, under the same circumstances, as a matter
+of course.  When I say I am unaffected by this happening I do not
+quite mean it.  I am affected.  I am aware that the spirit of me is
+informed with a sober elation of efficiency.  I have done something
+that had to be done, as any man will do what has to be done in the
+course of the day's work.
+
+Yes, I am a perishing blond, and a man, and I sit in the high place
+and bend the stupid ones to my will; and I am a lover, loving a royal
+woman of my own perishing breed, and together we occupy, and shall
+occupy, the high place of government and command until our kind
+perish from the earth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+
+
+Margaret was right.  The mutiny is not violating standards and
+precedents.  We have had our hands full for days and nights.  Ditman
+Olansen, the crank-eyed Berserker, has been killed by Wada, and the
+training-ship boy, the one lone cadet of our breed, has gone overside
+with the regulation sack of coal at his feet.  The poop has been
+rushed.  My illuminating invention has proved a success.  The men are
+getting hungry, and we still sit in command in the high place.
+
+First of all the attack on the poop, two nights ago, in Margaret's
+watch.  No; first, I have made another invention.  Assisted by the
+old steward, who knows, as a Chinese ought, a deal about fireworks,
+and getting my materials from our signal rockets and Roman candles, I
+manufactured half a dozen bombs.  I don't really think they are very
+deadly, and I know our extemporized fuses are slower than our voyage
+is at the present time; but nevertheless the bombs have served the
+purpose, as you shall see.
+
+And now to the attempt to rush the poop.  It was in Margaret's watch,
+from midnight till four in the morning, when the attack was made.
+Sleeping on the deck by the cabin skylight, I was very close to her
+when her revolver went off, and continued to go off.
+
+My first spring was to the tripping-lines on my illuminators.  The
+igniting and releasing devices worked cleverly.  I pulled two of the
+tripping-lines, and two of the contraptions exploded into light and
+noise and at the same time ran automatically down the jigger-trysail-
+stays, and automatically fetched up at the ends of their lines.  The
+illumination was instantaneous and gorgeous.  Henry, the two sail-
+makers, and the steward--at least three of them awakened from sound
+sleep, I am sure--ran to join us along the break of the poop.  All
+the advantage lay with us, for we were in the dark, while our foes
+were outlined against the light behind them.
+
+But such light!  The powder crackled, fizzed, and spluttered and
+spilled out the excess of gasolene from the flaming oakum balls so
+that streams of fire dripped down on the main deck beneath.  And the
+stuff of the signal-flares dripped red light and blue and green.
+
+There was not much of a fight, for the mutineers were shocked by our
+fireworks.  Margaret fired her revolver haphazardly, while I held my
+rifle for any that gained the poop.  But the attack faded away as
+quickly as it had come.  I did see Margaret overshoot some man,
+scaling the poop from the port-rail, and the next moment I saw Wada,
+charging like a buffalo, jab him in the chest with the spear he had
+made and thrust the boarder back and down.
+
+That was all.  The rest retreated for'ard on the dead run, while the
+three trysails, furled at the foot of the stays next to the mizzen
+and set on fire by the dripping gasolene, went up in flame and burned
+entirely away and out without setting the rest of the ship on fire.
+That is one of the virtues of a ship steel-masted and steel-stayed.
+
+And on the deck beneath us, crumpled, twisted, face hidden so that we
+could not identify him, lay the man whom Wada had speared.
+
+And now I come to a phase of adventure that is new to me.  I have
+never found it in the books.  In short, it is carelessness coupled
+with laziness, or vice versa.  I had used two of my illuminators.
+Only one remained.  An hour later, convinced of the movement aft of
+men along the deck, I let go the third and last and with its
+brightness sent them scurrying for'ard.  Whether they were attacking
+the poop tentatively to learn whether or not I had exhausted my
+illuminators, or whether or not they were trying to rescue Ditman
+Olansen, we shall never know.  The point is:  they did come aft; they
+were compelled to retreat by my illuminator; and it was my last
+illuminator.  And yet I did not start in, there and then, to
+manufacture fresh ones.  This was carelessness.  It was laziness.
+And I hazarded our lives, perhaps, if you please, on a psychological
+guess that I had convinced our mutineers that we had an inexhaustible
+stock of illuminators in reserve.
+
+The rest of Margaret's watch, which I shared with her, was
+undisturbed.  At four I insisted that she go below and turn in, but
+she compromised by taking my own bed behind the skylight.
+
+At break of day I was able to make out the body, still lying as last
+I had seen it.  At seven o'clock, before breakfast, and while
+Margaret still slept, I sent the two boys, Henry and Buckwheat, down
+to the body.  I stood above them, at the rail, rifle in hand and
+ready.  But from for'ard came no signs of life; and the lads, between
+them, rolled the crank-eyed Norwegian over so that we could recognize
+him, carried him to the rail, and shoved him stiffly across and into
+the sea.  Wada's spear-thrust had gone clear through him.
+
+But before twenty-four hours were up the mutineers evened the score
+handsomely.  They more than evened it, for we are so few that we
+cannot so well afford the loss of one as they can.  To begin with--
+and a thing I had anticipated and for which I had prepared my bombs--
+while Margaret and I ate a deck-breakfast in the shelter of the
+jiggermast a number of the men sneaked aft and got under the overhang
+of the poop.  Buckwheat saw them coming and yelled the alarm, but it
+was too late.  There was no direct way to get them out.  The moment I
+put my head over the rail to fire at them, I knew they would fire up
+at me with all the advantage in their favour.  They were hidden.  I
+had to expose myself.
+
+Two steel doors, tight-fastened and caulked against the Cape Horn
+seas, opened under the overhang of the poop from the cabin on to the
+main deck.  These doors the men proceeded to attack with sledge-
+hammers, while the rest of the gang, sheltered by the 'midship-house,
+showed that it stood ready for the rush when the doors were battered
+down.
+
+Inside, the steward guarded one door with his hacking knife, while
+with his spear Wada guarded the other door.  Nor, while I had
+dispatched them to this duty, was I idle.  Behind the jiggermast I
+lighted the fuse of one of my extemporized bombs.  When it was
+sputtering nicely I ran across the poop to the break and dropped the
+bomb to the main deck beneath, at the same time making an effort to
+toss it in under the overhang where the men battered at the port-
+door.  But this effort was distracted and made futile by a popping of
+several revolver shots from the gangways amidships.  One IS jumpy
+when soft-nosed bullets putt-putt around him.  As a result, the bomb
+rolled about on the open deck.
+
+Nevertheless, the illuminators had earned the respect of the
+mutineers for my fireworks.  The sputtering and fizzling of the fuse
+were too much for them, and from under the poop they ran for'ard like
+so many scuttling rabbits.  I know I could have got a couple with my
+rifle had I not been occupied with lighting the fuse of a second
+bomb.  Margaret managed three wild shots with her revolver, and the
+poop was immediately peppered by a scattering revolver fire from
+for'ard.
+
+Being provident (and lazy, for I have learned that it takes time and
+labour to manufacture home-made bombs), I pinched off the live end of
+the fuse in my hand.  But the fuse of the first bomb, rolling about
+on the main deck, merely fizzled on; and as I waited I resolved to
+shorten my remaining fuses.  Any of the men who fled, had he had the
+courage, could have pinched off the fuse, or tossed the bomb
+overboard, or, better yet, he could have tossed it up amongst us on
+the poop.
+
+It took fully five minutes for that blessed fuse to burn its slow
+length, and when the bomb did go off it was a sad disappointment.  I
+swear it could have been sat upon with nothing more than a jar to
+one's nerves.  And yet, in so far as the intimidation goes, it did
+its work.  The men have not since ventured under the overhang of the
+poop.
+
+That the mutineers were getting short of food was patent.  The
+Elsinore, sailless, drifted about that morning, the sport of wind and
+wave; and the gang put many lines overboard for the catching of
+molly-hawks and albatrosses.  Oh, I worried the hungry fishers with
+my rifle.  No man could show himself for'ard without having a bullet
+whop against the iron-work perilously near him.  And still they
+caught birds--not, however, without danger to themselves, and not
+without numerous losses of birds due to my rifle.
+
+Their procedure was to toss their hooks and bait over the rail from
+shelter and slowly to pay the lines out as the slight windage of the
+Elsinore's hull, spars, and rigging drifted her through the water.
+When a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter,
+till it was alongside.  This was the ticklish moment.  The hook,
+merely a hollow and acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on
+a piece of board at the end of the line, held the bird by pinching
+its curved beak into the acute angle.  The moment the line slacked
+the bird was released.  So, when alongside, this was the problem:  to
+lift the bird out of the water, straight up the side of the ship,
+without once jamming and easing and slacking.  When they tried to do
+this from shelter invariably they lost the bird.
+
+They worked out a method.  When the bird was alongside the several
+men with revolvers turned loose on me, while one man, overhauling and
+keeping the line taut, leaped to the rail and quickly hove the bird
+up and over and inboard.  I know this long-distance revolver fire
+seriously bothered me.  One cannot help jumping when death, in the
+form of a piece of flying lead, hits the rail beside him, or the mast
+over his head, or whines away in a ricochet from the steel shrouds.
+Nevertheless, I managed with my rifle to bother the exposed men on
+the rail to the extent that they lost one hooked bird out of two.
+And twenty-six men require a quantity of albatrosses and mollyhawks
+every twenty-four hours, while they can fish only in the daylight.
+
+As the day wore along I improved on my obstructive tactics.  When the
+Elsinore was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found
+that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could
+swing her bow off.  Then, when she had paid off till the wind was
+abeam, by reversing the wheel hard across to the opposite hard-over I
+could take advantage of her momentum away from the wind and work her
+off squarely before it.  This made all the wood-floated triangles of
+bird-snares tow aft along her sides.
+
+The first time I was ready for them.  With hooks and sinkers on our
+own lines aft, we tossed out, grappled, captured, and broke off nine
+of their lines.  But the next time, so slow is the movement of so
+large a ship, the mutineers hauled all their lines safely inboard ere
+they towed aft within striking distance of my grapnels.
+
+Still I improved.  As long as I kept the Elsinore before the wind
+they could not fish.  I experimented.  Once before it, by means of a
+winged-out spanker coupled with patient and careful steering, I could
+keep her before it.  This I did, hour by hour one of my men relieving
+another at the wheel.  As a result all fishing ceased.
+
+Margaret was holding the first dog-watch, four to six.  Henry was at
+the wheel steering.  Wada and Louis were below cooking the evening
+meal over the big coal-stove and the oil-burners.  I had just come up
+from below and was standing beside the sounding-machine, not half a
+dozen feet from Henry at the wheel.  Some obscure sound from the
+ventilator must have attracted me, for I was gazing at it when the
+thing happened.
+
+But first, the ventilator.  This is a steel shaft that leads up from
+the coal-carrying bowels of the ship beneath the lazarette and that
+wins to the outside-world via the after-wall of the chart-house.  In
+fact, it occupies the hollow inside of the double walls of the
+afterwall of the chart-house.  Its opening, at the height of a man's
+head, is screened with iron bars so closely set that no mature-bodied
+rat can squeeze between.  Also, this opening commands the wheel,
+which is a scant fifteen feet away and directly across the booby-
+hatch.  Some mutineer, crawling along the space between the coal and
+the deck of the lower hold, had climbed the ventilator shaft and was
+able to take aim through the slits between the bars.
+
+Practically simultaneously, I saw the out-rush of smoke and heard the
+report.  I heard a grunt from Henry, and, turning my head, saw him
+cling to the spokes and turn the wheel half a revolution as he sank
+to the deck.  It must have been a lucky shot.  The boy was perforated
+through the heart or very near to the heart--we have no time for
+post-mortems on the Elsinore.
+
+Tom Spink and the second sail-maker, Uchino, sprang to Henry's side.
+The revolver continued to go off through the ventilator slits, and
+the bullets thudded into the front of the half wheel-house all about
+them.  Fortunately they were not hit, and they immediately scrambled
+out of range.  The boy quivered for the space of a few seconds, and
+ceased to move; and one more cadet of the perishing breed perished as
+he did his day's work at the wheel of the Elsinore off the west coast
+of South America, bound from Baltimore to Seattle with a cargo of
+coal.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+
+
+The situation is hopelessly grotesque.  We in the high place command
+the food of the Elsinore, but the mutineers have captured her
+steering-gear.  That is to say, they have captured it without coming
+into possession of it.  They cannot steer, neither can we.  The poop,
+which is the high place, is ours.  The wheel is on the poop, yet we
+cannot touch the wheel.  From that slitted opening in the ventilator-
+shaft they are able to shoot down any man who approaches the wheel.
+And with that steel wall of the chart-house as a shield they laugh at
+us as from a conning tower.
+
+I have a plan, but it is not worth while putting into execution
+unless its need becomes imperative.  In the darkness of night it
+would be an easy trick to disconnect the steering-gear from the short
+tiller on the rudder-head, and then, by re-rigging the preventer
+tackles, steer from both sides of the poop well enough for'ard to be
+out of the range of the ventilator.
+
+In the meantime, in this fine weather, the Elsinore drifts as she
+lists, or as the windage of her lists and the sea-movement of waves
+lists.  And she can well drift.  Let the mutineers starve.  They can
+best be brought to their senses through their stomachs.
+
+
+And what are wits for, if not for use?  I am breaking the men's
+hungry hearts.  It is great fun in its way.  The mollyhawks and
+albatrosses, after their fashion, have followed the Elsinore up out
+of their own latitudes.  This means that there are only so many of
+them and that their numbers are not recruited.  Syllogism:  major
+premise, a definite and limited amount of bird-meat; minor premise,
+the only food the mutineers now have is bird-meat; conclusion,
+destroy the available food and the mutineers will be compelled to
+come back to duty.
+
+I have acted on this bit of logic.  I began experimentally by tossing
+small chunks of fat pork and crusts of stale bread overside.  When
+the birds descended for the feast I shot them.  Every carcass thus
+left floating on the surface of the sea was so much less meat for the
+mutineers.
+
+But I bettered the method.  Yesterday I overhauled the medicine-
+chest, and I dosed my chunks of fat pork and bread with the contents
+of every bottle that bore a label of skull and cross-bones.  I even
+added rough-on-rats to the deadliness of the mixture--this on the
+suggestion of the steward.
+
+And to-day, behold, there is no bird left in the sky.  True, while I
+played my game yesterday, the mutineers hooked a few of the birds;
+but now the rest are gone, and that is bound to be the last food for
+the men for'ard until they resume duty.
+
+Yes; it is grotesque.  It is a boy's game.  It reads like Midshipman
+Easy, like Frank Mildmay, like Frank Reade, Jr.; and yet, i' faith,
+life and death's in the issue.  I have just gone over the toll of our
+dead since the voyage began.
+
+First, was Christian Jespersen, killed by O'Sullivan when that maniac
+aspired to throw overboard Andy Fay's sea-boots; then O'Sullivan,
+because he interfered with Charles Davis' sleep, brained by that
+worthy with a steel marlin-spike; next Petro Marinkovich, just ere we
+began the passage of the Horn, murdered undoubtedly by the gangster
+clique, his life cut out of him with knives, his carcass left lying
+on deck to be found by us and be buried by us; and the Samurai,
+Captain West, a sudden though not a violent death, albeit occurring
+in the midst of all elemental violence as Mr. Pike clawed the
+Elsinore off the lee-shore of the Horn; and Boney the Splinter,
+following, washed overboard to drown as we cleared the sea-gashing
+rock-tooth where the southern tip of the continent bit into the
+storm-wrath of the Antarctic; and the big-footed, clumsy youth of a
+Finnish carpenter, hove overside as a Jonah by his fellows who
+believed that Finns control the winds; and Mike Cipriani and Bill
+Quigley, Rome and Ireland, shot down on the poop and flung overboard
+alive by Mr. Pike, still alive and clinging to the log-line, cut
+adrift by the steward to be eaten alive by great-beaked albatrosses,
+mollyhawks, and sooty-plumaged Cape hens; Steve Roberts, one-time
+cowboy, shot by me as he tried to shoot me; Herman Lunkenheimer, his
+throat cut before all of us by the hound Bombini as Kid Twist
+stretched the throat taut from behind; the two mates, Mr. Pike and
+Mr. Mellaire, mutually destroying each other in what must have been
+an unwitnessed epic combat; Ditman Olansen, speared by Wada as he
+charged Berserk at the head of the mutineers in the attempt to rush
+the poop; and last, Henry, the cadet of the perishing house, shot at
+the wheel, from the ventilator-shaft, in the course of his day's
+work.
+
+No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just
+made I see that we are not playing a boy's game.  Why, we have lost a
+third of us, and the bloodiest battles of history have rarely
+achieved such a percentage of mortality.  Fourteen of us have gone
+overside, and who can tell the end?
+
+Nevertheless, here we are, masters of matter, adventurers in the
+micro-organic, planet-weighers, sun-analysers, star-rovers, god-
+dreamers, equipped with the human wisdom of all the ages, and yet,
+quoting Mr. Pike, to come down to brass tacks, we are a lot of
+primitive beasts, fighting bestially, slaying bestially, pursuing
+bestially food and water, air for our lungs, a dry space above the
+deep, and carcasses skin-covered and intact.  And over this menagerie
+of beasts Margaret and I, with our Asiatics under us, rule top-dog.
+We are all dogs--there is no getting away from it.  And we, the fair-
+pigmented ones, by the seed of our ancestry rulers in the high place,
+shall remain top-dog over the rest of the dogs.  Oh, there is
+material in plenty for the cogitation of any philosopher on a
+windjammer in mutiny in this Year of our Lord 1913.
+
+
+Henry was the fourteenth of us to go overside into the dark and salty
+disintegration of the sea.  And in one day he has been well avenged;
+for two of the mutineers have followed him.  The steward called my
+attention to what was taking place.  He touched my arm half beyond
+his servant's self, as he gloated for'ard at the men heaving two
+corpses overside.  Weighted with coal, they sank immediately, so that
+we could not identify them.
+
+"They have been fighting," I said.  "It is good that they should
+fight among themselves."
+
+But the old Chinese merely grinned and shook his head.
+
+"You don't think they have been fighting?" I queried.
+
+"No fight.  They eat'm mollyhawk and albatross; mollyhawk and
+albatross eat'm fat pork; two men he die, plenty men much sick, you
+bet, damn to hell me very much glad.  I savve."
+
+And I think he was right.  While I was busy baiting the sea-birds the
+mutineers were catching them, and of a surety they must have caught
+some that had eaten of my various poisons.
+
+The two poisoned ones went over the side yesterday.  Since then we
+have taken the census.  Two men only have not appeared, and they are
+Bob, the fat and overgrown feebling youth, and, of all creatures, the
+Faun.  It seems my fate that I had to destroy the Faun--the poor,
+tortured Faun, always willing and eager, ever desirous to please.
+There is a madness of ill luck in all this.  Why couldn't the two
+dead men have been Charles Davis and Tony the Greek?  Or Bert Rhine
+and Kid Twist? or Bombini and Andy Fay?  Yes, and in my heart I know
+I should have felt better had it been Isaac Chantz and Arthur Deacon,
+or Nancy and Sundry Buyers, or Shorty and Larry.
+
+
+The steward has just tendered me a respectful bit of advice.
+
+"Next time we chuck'm overboard like Henry, much better we use old
+iron."
+
+"Getting short of coal?" I asked.
+
+He nodded affirmation.  We use a great deal of coal in our cooking,
+and when the present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a
+bulkhead to get at the cargo.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+
+
+The situation grows tense.  There are no more sea-birds, and the
+mutineers are starving.  Yesterday I talked with Bert Rhine.  To-day
+I talked with him again, and he will never forget, I am certain, the
+little talk we had this morning.
+
+To begin with, last evening, at five o'clock, I heard his voice
+issuing from between the slits of the ventilator in the after-wall of
+the chart-house.  Standing at the corner of the house, quite out of
+range, I answered him.
+
+"Getting hungry?" I jeered.  "Let me tell you what we are going to
+have for dinner.  I have just been down and seen the preparations.
+Now, listen:  first, caviare on toast; then, clam bouillon; and
+creamed lobster; and tinned lamb chops with French peas--you know,
+the peas that melt in one's mouth; and California asparagus with
+mayonnaise; and--oh, I forgot to mention fried potatoes and cold pork
+and beans; and peach pie; and coffee, real coffee.  Doesn't it make
+you hungry for your East Side?  And, say, think of the free lunch
+going to waste right now in a thousand saloons in good old New York."
+
+I had told him the truth.  The dinner I described (principally coming
+out of tins and bottles, to be sure) was the dinner we were to eat.
+
+"Cut that," he snarled.  "I want to talk business with YOU."
+
+"Right down to brass tacks," I gibed.  "Very well, when are you and
+the rest of your rats going to turn to?"
+
+"Cut that," he reiterated.  "I've got you where 1 want you now.  Take
+it from me, I'm givin' it straight.  I'm not tellin' you how, but
+I've got you under my thumb.  When I come down on you, you'll crack."
+
+"Hell is full of cocksure rats like you," I retorted; although I
+never dreamed how soon he would be writhing in the particular hell
+preparing for him.
+
+"Forget it," he sneered back.  "I've got you where I want you.  I'm
+just tellin' you, that's all."
+
+"Pardon me," I replied, "when I tell you that I'm from Missouri.
+You'll have to show ME."
+
+And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I
+naturally sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to
+make myself intelligible to him.  The situation was bestial, with
+sixteen of our complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I
+employed, perforce, were terms of bestiality.  And I thought, also,
+of I who was thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the utopians,
+the visions of the poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in
+a discussion with this ripened product of the New York City inferno.
+To him I must talk in the elemental terms of life and death, of food
+and water, of brutality and cruelty.
+
+"I give you your choice," he went on.  "Give in now, an' you won't be
+hurt, none of you."
+
+"And if we don't?" I dared airily.
+
+"You'll be sorry you was ever born.  You ain't a mush-head, you've
+got a girl there that's stuck on you.  It's about time you think of
+her.  You ain't altogether a mutt.  You get my drive?"
+
+Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of
+all I had ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at
+Peking, and of the plans of the white men for their womenkind in the
+event of the yellow hordes breaking through the last lines of
+defence.  Ay, and the old steward got it; for I saw his black eyes
+glint murderously in their narrow, tilted slits.  He knew the drift
+of the gangster's meaning.
+
+"You get my drive?" the gangster repeated.
+
+And I knew anger.  Not ordinary anger, but cold anger.  And I caught
+a vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the
+ages in all lands, on all seas.  I saw my kind, our women with us, in
+forlorn hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in
+jungle fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking
+ships.  And always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts.  We
+might die, our women with us; but, living, we had ruled.  It was a
+royal vision I glimpsed.  Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the
+ethic, which was the stuff of the fabric of which it was builded.  It
+was the sacred trust of the seed, the bequest of duty handed down
+from all ancestors.
+
+And I flamed more coldly.  It was not red-brute anger.  It was
+intellectual.  It was based on concept and history; it was the
+philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in
+their own strength.  Now at last I knew Nietzsche.  I knew the
+rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to high-
+conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the
+high place on the poop of a coal-carrier in the year nineteen-
+thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed
+servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and beneath the heel of me.
+God!  I felt kingly.  I knew at last the meaning of kingship.
+
+My anger was white and cold.  This subterranean rat of a miserable
+human, crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and
+mine!  A rat in the shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-
+like as any rat ever made!  And it was in this spirit that I answered
+the gangster.
+
+"When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad
+light of day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience,
+and when you show by your every action that you like it and are glad
+to do it, then, and not until then, will I talk with you."
+
+Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate
+of his kind at me through the slits in the ventilator.  But I made no
+reply.  I listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew
+why the English had blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of
+cannon in India long years ago.
+
+
+And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-
+gallon carboy of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended
+for it.
+
+In the meantime I was devising another way to overcome that deadly
+ventilator shaft.  The scheme was so simple that I was shamed in that
+it had not occurred to me at the very beginning.  The slitted opening
+was small.  Two sacks of flour, in a wooden frame, suspended by ropes
+from the edge of the chart-house roof directly above, would
+effectually cover the opening and block all revolver fire.
+
+No sooner thought than done.  Tom Spink and Louis were on top the
+chart-house with me and preparing to lower the flour, when we heard a
+voice issuing from the shaft.
+
+"Who's in there now?"  I demanded.  "Speak up."
+
+"I'm givin' you a last chance," Bert Rhine answered.
+
+And just then, around the corner of the house, stepped the steward.
+In his hand he carried a large galvanized pail, and my casual thought
+was that he had come to get rain-water from the barrels.  Even as I
+thought it, he made a sweeping half-circle with the pail and sloshed
+its contents into the ventilator-opening.  And even as the liquid
+flew through the air I knew it for what it was--undiluted sulphuric
+acid, two gallons of it from the carboy.
+
+The gangster must have received the liquid fire in the face and eyes.
+And, in the shock of pain, he must have released all holds and fallen
+upon the coal at the bottom of the shaft.  His cries and shrieks of
+anguish were terrible, and I was reminded of the starving rats which
+had squealed up that same shaft during the first months of the
+voyage.  The thing was sickening.  I prefer that men be killed
+cleanly and easily.
+
+The agony of the wretch I did not fully realize until the steward,
+his bare fore-arms sprayed by the splash from the ventilator slats,
+suddenly felt the bite of the acid through his tight, whole skin and
+made a mad rush for the water-barrel at the corner of the house.  And
+Bert Rhine, the silent man of soundless laughter, screaming below
+there on the coal, was enduring the bite of the acid in his eyes!
+
+We covered the ventilator opening with our flour-device; the screams
+from below ceased as the victim was evidently dragged for'ard across
+the coal by his mates; and yet I confess to a miserable forenoon.  As
+Carlyle has said:  "Death is easy; all men must die"; but to receive
+two gallons of full-strength sulphuric acid full in the face is a
+vastly different and vastly more horrible thing than merely to die.
+Fortunately, Margaret was below at the time, and, after a few
+minutes, in which I recovered my balance, I bullied and swore all our
+hands into keeping the happening from her.
+
+
+Oh, well, and we have got ours in retaliation.  Off and on, through
+all of yesterday, after the ventilator tragedy, there were noises
+beneath the cabin floor or deck.  We heard them under the dining-
+table, under the steward's pantry, under Margaret's stateroom.
+
+This deck is overlaid with wood, but under the wood is iron, or steel
+rather, such as of which the whole Elsinore is builded.
+
+Margaret and I, followed by Louis, Wada, and the steward, walked
+about from place to place, wherever the sounds arose of tappings and
+of cold-chisels against iron.  The tappings seemed to come from
+everywhere; but we concluded that the concentration necessary on any
+spot to make an opening large enough for a man's body would
+inevitably draw our attention to that spot.  And, as Margaret said:
+
+"If they do manage to cut through, they must come up head-first, and,
+in such emergence, what chance would they have against us?"
+
+So I relieved Buckwheat from deck duty, placed him on watch over the
+cabin floor, to be relieved by the steward in Margaret's watches.
+
+In the late afternoon, after prodigious hammerings and clangings in a
+score of places, all noises ceased.  Neither in the first and second
+dog-watches, nor in the first watch of the night, were the noises
+resumed.  When I took charge of the poop at midnight Buckwheat
+relieved the steward in the vigil over the cabin floor; and as I
+leaned on the rail at the break of the poop, while my four hours
+dragged slowly by, least of all did I apprehend danger from the
+cabin--especially when I considered the two-gallon pail of raw
+sulphuric acid ready to hand for the first head that might arise
+through an opening in the floor not yet made.  Our rascals for'ard
+might scale the poop; or cross aloft from mizzenmast to jigger and
+descend upon our heads; but how they could invade us through the
+floor was beyond me.
+
+But they did invade.  A modern ship is a complex affair.  How was I
+to guess the manner of the invasion?
+
+It was two in the morning, and for an hour I had been puzzling my
+head with watching the smoke arise from the after-division of the
+for'ard-house and with wondering why the mutineers should have up
+steam in the donkey-engine at such an ungodly hour.  Not on the whole
+voyage had the donkey-engine been used.  Four bells had just struck,
+and I was leaning on the rail at the break of the poop when I heard a
+prodigious coughing and choking from aft.  Next, Wada ran across the
+deck to me.
+
+"Big trouble with Buckwheat," he blurted at me.  "You go quick."
+
+I shoved him my rifle and left him on guard while I raced around the
+chart-house.  A lighted match, in the hands of Tom Spink, directed
+me.  Between the booby-hatch and the wheel, sitting up and rocking
+back and forth with wringings of hands and wavings of arms, tears of
+agony bursting from his eyes, was Buckwheat.  My first thought was
+that in some stupid way he had got the acid into his own eyes.  But
+the terrible fashion in which he coughed and strangled would quickly
+have undeceived me, had not Louis, bending over the booby-companion,
+uttered a startled exclamation.
+
+I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made
+me catch my breath and gasp.  I had inhaled sulphur.  On the instant
+I forgot the Elsinore, the mutineers for'ard, everything save one
+thing.
+
+The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily
+about the big after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and
+strangled me.  By the dim light of a sea-lantern I saw the old
+steward, on hands and knees, coughing and gasping, the while he shook
+awake Yatsuda, the first sail-maker.  Uchino, the second sail-maker,
+still strangled in his sleep.
+
+It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I
+proved it when I dropped on my hands and knees.  I rolled Uchino out
+of his blankets with a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my
+head, face, and mouth, arose to my feet, and dashed for'ard into the
+hall.  After a couple of collisions with the wood-work I again
+dropped to the floor and rearranged the blankets so that, while my
+mouth remained covered, I could draw or withdraw, a thickness across
+my eyes.
+
+The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the
+dizziness I suffered.  I blundered into the steward's pantry, and out
+of it, missed the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard
+opening in the long hall, and found myself bent double by violent
+collision with the dining-room table.
+
+But I had my bearings.  Feeling my way around the table and bumping
+most of the poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied
+stove, I emerged in the cross-hall and made my way to starboard.
+Here, at the base of the chart-room stairway, I gained the hall that
+led aft.  By this time my own situation seemed so serious that,
+careless of any collision, I went aft in long leaps.
+
+Margaret's door was open.  I plunged into her room.  The moment I
+drew the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a
+modicum of what Bert Rhine must have suffered.  Oh, the intolerable
+bite of the sulphur in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain!  No light
+burned in the room.  I could only strangle and stumble for'ard to
+Margaret's bed, upon which I collapsed.
+
+She was not there.  I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her
+body had left in the under-sheet.  Even in my agony and helplessness
+the intimacy of that warmth her body had left was very dear to me.
+Between the lack of oxygen in my lungs (due to the blankets), the
+pain of the sulphur, and the mortal dizziness in my brain, I felt
+that I might well cease there where the linen warmed my hand.
+
+Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing
+from along the hall.  It was new life to me.  I fell from bed to
+floor and managed to get upright until I gained the hall, where again
+I fell.  Thereafter I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the
+stairway.  By means of the newel-post I drew myself upright and
+listened.  Near me something moved and strangled.  I fell upon it and
+found in my arms all the softness of Margaret.
+
+How describe that battle up the stairway?  It was a crucifixion of
+struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony.  Time after time, as my
+consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort
+and let myself blur down into the ultimate dark.  I fought my way
+step by step.  Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her
+body step by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell
+with it, and back with it, and lost much that had been so hardly
+gained.  And yet out of it all this I remember:  that warm soft body
+of hers was the dearest thing in the world--vastly more dear than the
+pleasant land I remotely remembered, than all the books and all the
+humans I had ever known, than the deck above, with its sweet pure air
+softly blowing under the cool starry sky.
+
+As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing:  the thought of
+leaving her there and saving myself never crossed my mind.  The one
+place for me was where she was.
+
+Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not
+absurd during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway.  One
+must taste death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive
+sanction for purple passages.
+
+And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed
+that upward way, I prayed one prayer:  that the chart-house doors out
+upon the poop might not be shut.  Life and death lay right there in
+that one point of the issue.  Was there any creature of my creatures
+aft with common sense and anticipation sufficient to make him think
+to open those doors?  How I yearned for one man, for one proved
+henchman, such as Mr. Pike, to be on the poop!  As it was, with the
+sole exception of Tom Spink and Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.
+
+I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my
+feet.  Nor could I rise upright on my knees.  I crawled like any
+four-legged animal--nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the
+deck.  It was a matter of several feet to the doorway.  I died a
+score of times in those several feet; but ever I endured the agony of
+resurrection and dragged Margaret with me.  Sometimes the full
+strength I could exert did not move her, and I lay with her and
+coughed and strangled my way through to another resurrection.
+
+And the door was open.  The doors to starboard and to port were both
+open; and as the Elsinore rolled a draught through the chart-house
+hall my lungs filled with pure, cool air.  As I drew myself across
+the high threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I
+heard the cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver.  And,
+ere I fainted into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone
+so beyond endurance that it had achieved its own anaesthesia, I
+glimpsed, dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail,
+dark forms that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-
+mast brightly lighted by our illuminators.
+
+
+Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop.  My five Asiatics and
+two white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay
+unconscious side by side.
+
+The whole affair was very simple.  Modern maritime quarantine demands
+that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-
+carriers.  In the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a
+complete fumigating apparatus.  The mutineers had merely to lay and
+fasten the pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the
+double-deck of steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and
+begin to pump.  Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the
+strangling sulphur fumes.  We in the high place had been smoked out
+by our rascals like so many rats.
+
+It was Wada who had opened one of the doors.  The old steward had
+opened the other.  Together they had attempted the descent of the
+stairway and been driven back by the fumes.  Then they had engaged in
+the struggle to repel the rush from for'ard.
+
+Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves
+the lungs sore.  Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we
+draw breath in anything that resembles comfort.  But still my lungs
+were not so sore as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she
+meant to me.  And yet she is only a woman--I tell her so; I tell her
+that there are at least seven hundred and fifty millions of two-
+legged, long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like
+her on the planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity of
+numbers of her sex and kind.  But I tell her something more.  I tell
+her that of all of them she is the only one.  And, better yet, to
+myself and for myself, I believe it.  I know it.  The last least part
+of me and all of me proclaims it.
+
+Love IS wonderful.  It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement.
+Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and
+calculating and classifying love.  It is a profound foolishness, a
+cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher--
+yes, and of the futurist.  But when one forsakes such intellectual
+flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover,
+then all he may do, and which is what he cannot help doing, is to
+yield to the compulsions of being and throw both his arms around love
+and hold it closer to him than is his own heart close to him.  This
+is the summit of his life, and of man's life.  Higher than this no
+man may rise.  The philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks
+far below.  He who has not loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of
+living.  I know.  I love Margaret, a woman.  She is desirable.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L
+
+
+
+In the past twenty-four hours many things have happened.  To begin
+with, we nearly lost the steward in the second dog-watch last
+evening.  Through the slits in the ventilator some man thrust a knife
+into the sacks of flour and cut them wide open from top to bottom.
+In the dark the flour poured to the deck unobserved.
+
+Of course, the man behind could not see through the screen of empty
+sacks, but he took a blind pot-shot at point-blank range when the
+steward went by, slip-sloppily dragging the heels of his slippers.
+Fortunately it was a miss, but so close a miss was it that his cheek
+and neck were burned with powder grains.
+
+At six bells in the first watch came another surprise.  Tom Spink
+came to me where I stood guard at the for'ard end of the poop.  His
+voice shook as he spoke.
+
+"For the love of God, sir, they've come," he said.
+
+"Who?" I asked sharply.
+
+"Them," he chattered.  "The ones that come aboard off the Horn, sir,
+the three drownded sailors.  They're there, aft, sir, the three of
+'em, standin' in a row by the wheel."
+
+"How did they get there?"
+
+"Bein' warlocks, they flew, sir.  You didn't see 'm go by you, did
+you, sir?"
+
+"No," I admitted.  "They never went by me."
+
+Poor Tom Spink groaned.
+
+"But there are lines aloft there on which they could cross over from
+mizzen to jigger," I added.  "Send Wada to me."
+
+When the latter relieved me I went aft.  And there in a row were our
+three pale-haired storm-waifs with the topaz eyes.  In the light of a
+bull's-eye, held on them by Louis, their eyes never seemed more like
+the eyes of great cats.  And, heavens, they purred!  At least, the
+inarticulate noises they made sounded more like purring than anything
+else.  That these sounds meant friendliness was very evident.  Also,
+they held out their hands, palms upward, in unmistakable sign of
+peace.  Each in turn doffed his cap and placed my hand for a moment
+on his head.  Without doubt this meant their offer of fealty, their
+acceptance of me as master.
+
+I nodded my head.  There was nothing to be said to men who purred
+like cats, while sign-language in the light of the bull's-eye was
+rather difficult.  Tom Spink groaned protest when I told Louis to
+take them below and give them blankets.
+
+I made the sleep-sign to them, and they nodded gratefully, hesitated,
+then pointed to their mouths and rubbed their stomachs.
+
+"Drowned men do not eat," I laughed to Tom Spink.  "Go down and watch
+them.  Feed them up, Louis, all they want.  It's a good sign of short
+rations for'ard."
+
+At the end of half an hour Tom Spink was back.
+
+"Well, did they eat?" I challenged him.
+
+But he was unconvinced.  The very quantity they had eaten was a
+suspicious thing, and, further, he had heard of a kind of ghost that
+devoured dead bodies in graveyards.  Therefore, he concluded, mere
+non-eating was no test for a ghost.
+
+The third event of moment occurred this morning at seven o'clock.
+The mutineers called for a truce; and when Nosey Murphy, the Maltese
+Cockney, and the inevitable Charles Davis stood beneath me on the
+main deck, their faces showed lean and drawn.  Famine had been my
+great ally.  And in truth, with Margaret beside me in that high place
+of the break of the poop, as I looked down on the hungry wretches I
+felt very strong.  Never had the inequality of numbers fore and aft
+been less than now.  The three deserters, added to our own nine, made
+twelve of us, while the mutineers, after subtracting Ditman Olansen,
+Bob and the Faun, totalled only an even score.  And of these Bert
+Rhine must certainly be in a bad way, while there were many
+weaklings, such as Sundry Buyers, Nancy, Larry, and Lars Jacobsen.
+
+"Well, what do you want?" I demanded.  "I haven't much time to waste.
+Breakfast is ready and waiting."
+
+Charles Davis started to speak, but I shut him off.
+
+"I'll have nothing out of you, Davis.  At least not now.  Later on,
+when I'm in that court of law you've bothered me with for half the
+voyage, you'll get your turn at talking.  And when that time comes
+don't forget that I shall have a few words to say."
+
+Again he began, but this time was stopped by Nosey Murphy.
+
+"Aw, shut your trap, Davis," the gangster snarled, "or I'll shut it
+for you."  He glanced up to me.  "We want to go back to work, that's
+what we want."
+
+"Which is not the way to ask for it," I answered.
+
+"Sir," he added hastily.
+
+"That's better," I commented.
+
+"Oh, my God, sir, don't let 'm come aft."  Tom Spink muttered
+hurriedly in my ear.  "That'd be the end of all of us.  And even if
+they didn't get you an' the rest, they'd heave me over some dark
+night.  They ain't never goin' to forgive me, sir, for joinin' in
+with the afterguard."
+
+I ignored the interruption and addressed the gangster.
+
+"There's nothing like going to work when you want to as badly as you
+seem to.  Suppose all hands get sail on her just to show good
+intention."
+
+"We'd like to eat first, sir," he objected.
+
+"I'd like to see you setting sail, first," was my reply.  "And you
+may as well get it from me straight that what I like goes, aboard
+this ship."--I almost said "hooker."
+
+Nosey Murphy hesitated and looked to the Maltese Cockney for counsel.
+The latter debated, as if gauging the measure of his weakness while
+he stared aloft at the work involved.  Finally he nodded.
+
+"All right, sir," the gangster spoke up.  "We'll do it . . . but
+can't something be cookin' in the galley while we're doin' it?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"I didn't have that in mind, and I don't care to change my mind now.
+When every sail is stretched and every yard braced, and all that mess
+of gear cleared up, food for a good meal will be served out.  You
+needn't bother about the spanker nor the mizzen-braces.  We'll make
+your work lighter by that much."
+
+In truth, as they climbed aloft they showed how miserably weak they
+were.  There were some too feeble to go aloft.  Poor Sundry Buyers
+continually pressed his abdomen as he toiled around the deck-
+capstans; and never was Nancy's face quite so forlorn as when he
+obeyed the Maltese Cockney's command and went up to loose the mizzen-
+skysail.
+
+In passing, I must note one delicious miracle that was worked before
+our eyes.  They were hoisting the mizzen-upper-topsail-yard by means
+of one of the patent deck-capstans.  Although they had reversed the
+gear so as to double the purchase, they were having a hard time of
+it.  Lars Jacobsen was limping on his twice-broken leg, and with him
+were Sundry Buyers, Tony the Greek, Bombini, and Mulligan Jacobs.
+Nosey Murphy held the turn.
+
+When they stopped from sheer exhaustion Murphy's glance chanced to
+fall on Charles Davis, the one man who had not worked since the
+outset of the voyage and who was not working now.
+
+"Bear a hand, Davis," the gangster called.
+
+Margaret gurgled low laughter in my ear as she caught the drift of
+the episode.
+
+The sea-lawyer looked at the other in amazement ere he answered:
+
+"I guess not."
+
+After nodding Sundry Buyers over to him to take the turn Murphy
+straightened his back and walked close to Davis, then said very
+quietly:
+
+"I guess yes."
+
+That was all.  For a space neither spoke.  Davis seemed to be giving
+the matter judicial consideration.  The men at the capstan panted,
+rested, and looked on--all save Bombini, who slunk across the deck
+until he stood at Murphy's shoulder.
+
+Under such circumstances the decision Charles Davis gave was
+eminently the right one, although even then he offered a compromise.
+
+"I'll hold the turn," he volunteered.
+
+"You'll lump around one of them capstan-bars," Murphy said.
+
+The sea-lawyer made no mistake.  He knew in all absoluteness that he
+was choosing between life and death, and he limped over to the
+capstan and found his place.  And as the work started, and as he
+toiled around and around the narrow circle, Margaret and I
+shamelessly and loudly laughed our approval.  And our own men stole
+for'ard along the poop to peer down at the spectacle of Charles Davis
+at work.
+
+All of which must have pleased Nosey Murphy, for, as he continued to
+hold the turn and coil down, he kept a critical eye on Davis.
+
+"More juice, Davis!" he commanded with abrupt sharpness.
+
+And Davis, with a startle, visibly increased his efforts.
+
+This was too much for our fellows, who, Asiatics and all, applauded
+with laughter and hand-clapping.  And what could I do?  It was a gala
+day, and our faithful ones deserved some little recompense of
+amusement.  So I ignored the breach of discipline and of poop
+etiquette by strolling away aft with Margaret.
+
+At the wheel was one of our storm-waifs.  I set the course due east
+for Valparaiso, and sent the steward below to bring up sufficient
+food for one substantial meal for the mutineers.
+
+"When do we get our next grub, sir?" Nosey Murphy asked, as the
+steward served the supplies down to him from the poop.
+
+"At midday," I answered.  "And as long as you and your gang are good,
+you'll get your grub three times each day.  You can choose your own
+watches any way you please.  But the ship's work must be done, and
+done properly.  If it isn't, then the grub stops.  That will do.  Now
+go for'ard."
+
+"One thing more, sir," he said quickly.  "Bert Rhine is awful bad.
+He can't see, sir.  It looks like he's going to lose his face.  He
+can't sleep.  He groans all the time."
+
+
+It was a busy day.  I made a selection of things from the medicine-
+chest for the acid-burned gangster; and, finding that Murphy knew how
+to manipulate a hypodermic syringe, entrusted him with one.
+
+Then, too, I practised with the sextant and think I fairly caught the
+sun at noon and correctly worked up the observation.  But this is
+latitude, and is comparatively easy.  Longitude is more difficult.
+But I am reading up on it.
+
+All afternoon a gentle northerly fan of air snored the Elsinore
+through the water at a five-knot clip, and our course lay east for
+land, for the habitations of men, for the law and order that men
+institute whenever they organize into groups.  Once in Valparaiso,
+with police flag flying, our mutineers will be taken care of by the
+shore authorities.
+
+Another thing I did was to rearrange our watches aft so as to split
+up the three storm-visitors.  Margaret took one in her watch, along
+with the two sail-makers, Tom Spink, and Louis.  Louis is half white,
+and all trustworthy, so that, at all times, on deck or below, he is
+told off to the task of never letting the topaz-eyed one out of his
+sight.
+
+In my watch are the steward, Buckwheat, Wada, and the other two
+topaz-eyed ones.  And to one of them Wada is told off; and to the
+other is assigned the steward.  We are not taking any chances.
+Always, night and day, on duty or off, these storm-strangers will
+have one of our proved men watching them.
+
+
+Yes; and I tried the stranger men out last evening.  It was after a
+council with Margaret.  She was sure, and I agreed with her, that the
+men for'ard are not blindly yielding to our bringing them in to be
+prisoners in Valparaiso.  As we tried to forecast it, their plan is
+to desert the Elsinore in the boats as soon as we fetch up with the
+land.  Also, considering some of the bitter lunatic spirits for'ard,
+there would be a large chance of their drilling the Elsinore's steel
+sides and scuttling her ere they took to the boats.  For scuttling a
+ship is surely as ancient a practice as mutiny on the high seas.
+
+So it was, at one in the morning, that I tried out our strangers.
+Two of them I took for'ard with me in the raid on the small boats.
+One I left beside Margaret, who kept charge of the poop.  On the
+other side of him stood the steward with his big hacking knife.  By
+signs I had made it clear to him, and to his two comrades who were to
+accompany me for'ard, that at the first sign of treachery he would be
+killed.  And not only did the old steward, with signs emphatic and
+unmistakable, pledge himself to perform the execution, but we were
+all convinced that he was eager for the task.
+
+With Margaret I also left Buckwheat and Tom Spink.  Wada, the two
+sail-makers, Louis, and the two topaz-eyed ones accompanied me.  In
+addition to fighting weapons we were armed with axes.  We crossed the
+main deck unobserved, gained the bridge by way of the 'midship-house,
+and by way of the bridge gained the top of the for'ard-house.  Here
+were the first boats we began work on; but, first of all, I called in
+the lookout from the forecastle-head.
+
+He was Mulligan Jacobs; and he picked his way back across the wreck
+of the bridge where the fore-topgallant-yard still lay, and came up
+to me unafraid, as implacable and bitter as ever.
+
+"Jacobs," I whispered, "you are to stay here beside me until we
+finish the job of smashing the boats.  Do you get that?"
+
+"As though it could fright me," he growled all too loudly.  "Go ahead
+for all I care.  I know your game.  And I know the game of the hell's
+maggots under our feet this minute.  'Tis they that'd desert in the
+boats.  'Tis you that'll smash the boats an' jail 'm kit an' crew."
+
+"S-s-s-h," I vainly interpolated.
+
+"What of it?" he went on as loudly as ever.  "They're sleepin' with
+full bellies.  The only night watch we keep is the lookout.  Even
+Rhine's asleep.  A few jolts of the needle has put a clapper to his
+eternal moanin'.  Go on with your work.  Smash the boats.  'Tis
+nothin' I care.  'Tis well I know my own crooked back is worth more
+to me than the necks of the scum of the world below there."
+
+"If you felt that way, why didn't you join us?" I queried.
+
+"Because I like you no better than them an' not half so well.  They
+are what you an' your fathers have made 'em.  An' who in hell are you
+an' your fathers?  Robbers of the toil of men.  I like them little.
+I like you and your fathers not at all.  Only I like myself and me
+crooked back that's a livin' proof there ain't no God and makes
+Browning a liar."
+
+"Join us now," I urged, meeting him in his mood.  "It will be easier
+for your back."
+
+"To hell with you," was his answer.  "Go ahead an' smash the boats.
+You can hang some of them.  But you can't touch me with the law.
+'Tis me that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise
+a hand against any man--a feather blown about by the windy contention
+of men strong in their back an' brainless in their heads."
+
+"As you please," I said.
+
+"As I can't help pleasin'," he retorted, "bein' what I am an' so made
+for the little flash between the darknesses which men call life.  Now
+why couldn't I a-ben a butterfly, or a fat pig in a full trough, or a
+mere mortal man with a straight back an' women to love me?  Go on an'
+smash the boats.  Play hell to the top of your bent.  Like me, you'll
+end in the darkness.  And your darkness'll be--as dark as mine."
+
+"A full belly puts the spunk back into you," I sneered.
+
+"'Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid.
+Go on an' smash the boats."
+
+"Whose idea was the sulphur?" I asked.
+
+"I'm not tellin' you the man, but I envied him until it showed
+failure.  An' whose idea was it--to douse the sulphuric into Rhine's
+face?  He'll lose that same face, from the way it's shedding."
+
+"Nor will I tell you," I said.  "Though I will tell you that I am
+glad the idea was not mine."
+
+"Oh, well," he muttered cryptically, "different customs on different
+ships, as the cook said when he went for'ard to cast off the spanker
+sheet."
+
+Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time
+to work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea.
+Mulligan Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he
+not been born crooked with a crooked back.
+
+And we smashed the boats.  With axes and sledges it was an easier
+task than I had imagined.  On top of both houses we left the boats
+masses of splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most
+energetically; and we regained the poop without a shot being fired.
+The forecastle turned out, of course, at our noise, but made no
+attempt to interfere with us.
+
+And right here I register another complaint against the sea-
+novelists.  A score of men for'ard, desperate all, with desperate
+deeds behind them, and jail and the gallows facing them not many days
+away, should have only begun to fight.  And yet this score of men did
+nothing while we destroyed their last chance for escape.
+
+"But where did they get the grub?" the steward asked me afterwards.
+
+This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr. Pike
+began cudgelling his brains over it.  I wonder, had I asked Mulligan
+Jacobs the question, if he would have told me?  At any rate, in court
+at Valparaiso that question will be answered.  In the meantime I
+suppose I shall submit to having the steward ask me it daily.
+
+"It is murder and mutiny on the high seas," I told them this morning,
+when they came aft in a body to complain about the destruction of the
+boats and to demand my intentions.
+
+And as I looked down upon the poor wretches from the break of the
+poop, standing there in the high place, the vision of my kind down
+all its mad, violent, and masterful past was strong upon me.
+Already, since our departure from Baltimore, three other men,
+masters, had occupied this high place and gone their way--the
+Samurai, Mr. Pike, and Mr. Mellaire.  I stood here, fourth, no
+seaman, merely a master by the blood of my ancestors; and the work of
+the Elsinore in the world went on.
+
+Bert Rhine, his head and face swathed in bandages, stood there
+beneath me, and I felt for him a tingle of respect.  He, too, in a
+subterranean, ghetto way was master over his rats.  Nosey Murphy and
+Kid Twist stood shoulder to shoulder with their stricken gangster
+leader.  It was his will, because of his terrible injury, to get in
+to land and doctors as quickly as possible.  He preferred taking his
+chance in court against the chance of losing his life, or, perhaps,
+his eyesight.
+
+The crew was divided against itself; and Isaac Chantz, the Jew, his
+wounded shoulder with a hunch to it, seemed to lead the revolt
+against the gangsters.  His wound was enough to convict him in any
+court, and well he knew it.  Beside him, and at his shoulders,
+clustered the Maltese Cockney, Andy Fay, Arthur Deacon, Frank
+Fitzgibbon, Richard Giller, and John Hackey.
+
+In another group, still allegiant to the gangsters, were men such as
+Shorty, Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, and Larry.  Charles Davis was
+prominently in the gangster group.  A fourth group was composed of
+Sundry Buyers, Nancy, and Tony the Greek.  This group was distinctly
+neutral.  And, finally, unaffiliated, quite by himself, stood
+Mulligan Jacobs--listening, I fancy, to far echoes of ancient wrongs,
+and feeling, I doubt not, the bite of the iron-hot hooks in his
+brain.
+
+"What are you going to do with us, sir?" Isaac Chantz demanded of me,
+in defiance to the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.
+
+Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew's voice.
+Chantz's partisans drew closer to him.
+
+"Jail you," I answered from above.  "And it shall go as hard with all
+of you as I can make it hard."
+
+"Maybe you will an' maybe you won't," the Jew retorted.
+
+"Shut up, Chantz!" Bert Rhine commanded.
+
+"And you'll get yours, you wop," Chantz snarled, "if I have to do it
+myself."
+
+I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I
+have been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was
+I in observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I
+failed to glimpse the tragedy into which it was culminating.
+
+"Bombini!" Bert Rhine said.
+
+His voice was imperative.  It was the order of a master to the dog at
+heel.  Bombini responded.  He drew his knife and started to advance
+upon the Jew.  But a deep rumbling, animal-like in its SOUND and
+menace, arose in the throats of those about the Jew.
+
+Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader,
+whose face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not
+see.
+
+"'Tis a good deed--do it, Bombini," Charles Davis encouraged.
+
+"Shut your face, Davis!" came out from Bert Rhine's bandages.
+
+Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into
+Bombini's side, then covered the men about the Jew.
+
+Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian.  He was
+caught between the mill-stones, "Bombini, stick that Jew," Bert Rhine
+commanded.
+
+The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either
+side, Kid Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.
+
+"I cannot see him," Bert Rhine went on; "but by God I will see him!"
+
+And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the
+bandages.  The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement.
+I saw the horror of his face, but the description of it is beyond the
+limits of any English I possess.  I was aware that Margaret, at my
+shoulder, gasped and shuddered.
+
+"Bombini!--stick him," the gangster repeated.  "And stick any man
+that raises a yap.  Murphy!  See that Bombini does his work."
+
+Murphy's knife was out and at the bravo's back.  Kid Twist covered
+the Jew's group with his revolver.  And the three advanced.
+
+It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed
+from dream to action.
+
+"Bombini!" I said sharply.
+
+He paused and looked up.
+
+"Stand where you are," I ordered, "till I do some talking.--Chantz!
+Make no mistake.  Rhine is boss for'ard.  You take his orders . . .
+until we get into Valparaiso; then you'll take your chances along
+with him in jail.  In the meantime, what Rhine says goes.  Get that,
+and get it straight.  I am behind Rhine until the police come on
+board.--Bombini! do whatever Rhine tells you.  I'll shoot the man who
+tries to stop you.--Deacon!  Stand away from Chantz.  Go over to the
+fife-rail."
+
+All hands knew the stream of lead my automatic rifle could throw, and
+Arthur Deacon knew it.  He hesitated barely a moment, then obeyed.
+
+"Fitzgibbon!--Giller!--Hackey!" I called in turn, and was obeyed.
+"Fay!" I called twice, ere the response came.
+
+Isaac Chantz stood alone, and Bombini now showed eagerness.
+
+"Chantz!" I said; "don't you think it would be healthier to go over
+to the fife-rail and be good?"
+
+He debated the matter not many seconds, resheathed his knife, and
+complied.
+
+The tang of power!  I was minded to let literature get the better of
+me and read the rascals a lecture; but thank heaven I had sufficient
+proportion and balance to refrain.
+
+"Rhine!" I said.
+
+He turned his corroded face up to me and blinked in an effort to see.
+
+"As long as Chantz takes your orders, leave him alone.  We'll need
+every hand to work the ship in.  As for yourself, send Murphy aft in
+half an hour and I'll give him the best the medicine-chest affords.
+That is all.  Go for'ard."
+
+And they shambled away, beaten and dispirited.
+
+"But that man--his face--what happened to him?" Margaret asked of me.
+
+Sad it is to end love with lies.  Sadder still is it to begin love
+with lies.  I had tried to hide this one happening from Margaret, and
+I had failed.  It could no longer be hidden save by lying; and so I
+told her the truth, told her how and why the gangster had had his
+face dashed with sulphuric acid by the old steward who knew white men
+and their ways.
+
+
+There is little more to write.  The mutiny of the Elsinore is over.
+The divided crew is ruled by the gangsters, who are as intent on
+getting their leader into port as I am intent on getting all of them
+into jail.  The first lap of the voyage of the Elsinore draws to a
+close.  Two days, at most, with our present sailing, will bring us
+into Valparaiso.  And then, as beginning a new voyage, the Elsinore
+will depart for Seattle.
+
+
+One thing more remains for me to write, and then this strange log of
+a strange cruise will be complete.  It happened only last night.  I
+am yet fresh from it, and athrill with it and with the promise of it.
+
+Margaret and I spent the last hour of the second dog-watch together
+at the break of the poop.  It was good again to feel the Elsinore
+yielding to the wind-pressure on her canvas, to feel her again
+slipping and sliding through the water in an easy sea.
+
+Hidden by the darkness, clasped in each other's arms, we talked love
+and love plans.  Nor am I shamed to confess that I was all for
+immediacy.  Once in Valparaiso, I contended, we would fit out the
+Elsinore with fresh crew and officers and send her on her way.  As
+for us, steamers and rapid travelling would fetch us quickly home.
+Furthermore, Valparaiso being a place where such things as licences
+and ministers obtained, we would be married ere we caught the fast
+steamers for home.
+
+But Margaret was obdurate.  The Wests had always stood by their
+ships, she urged; had always brought their ships in to the ports
+intended or had gone down with their ships in the effort.  The
+Elsinore had cleared from Baltimore for Seattle with the Wests in the
+high place.  The Elsinore would re-equip with officers and men in
+Valparaiso, and the Elsinore would arrive in Seattle with a West
+still on board.
+
+"But think, dear heart," I objected.  "The voyage will require
+months.  Remember what Henley has said:  'Every kiss we take or give
+leaves us less of life to live.'"
+
+She pressed her lips to mine.
+
+"We kiss," she said.
+
+But I was stupid.
+
+"Oh, the weary, weary months," I complained.  "You dear silly," she
+gurgled.  "Don't you understand?"
+
+"I understand only that it is many a thousand miles from Valparaiso
+to Seattle," I answered.
+
+"You won't understand," she challenged.
+
+"I am a fool," I admitted.  "I am aware of only one thing:  I want
+you.  I want you."
+
+"You are a dear, but you are very, very stupid," she said, and as she
+spoke she caught my hand and pressed the palm of it against her
+cheek.  "What do you feel?" she asked.
+
+"Hot cheeks--cheeks most hot."
+
+"I am blushing for what your stupidity compels me to say," she
+explained.  "You have already said that such things as licences and
+ministers obtain in Valparaiso . . . and . . . and, well . . . "
+
+"You mean . . . ?"  I stammered.
+
+"Just that," she confirmed.
+
+"The honeymoon shall be on the Elsinore from Valparaiso all the way
+to Seattle?" I rattled on.
+
+"The many thousands of miles, the weary, weary months," she teased in
+my own intonations, until I stifled her teasing with my lips.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Mutiny of the "Elsinore", by Jack London
+
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